LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 



Lj 



^Rjr - - |opi)ng!it |jo. Q.A i. 



! UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE PSALMS; 

WITH NOTES, 



CRITICAL, EXPLANATORY, AND PRACTICAL, 



DESIGNED FOR BOTH PASTORS AND PEOPLE. 



BY 

Rev. HENRY COWLES, D.D. 



" Understandest thou what thou readest? And he said, How can I unless some man 
should guide me? " — Acts viii : 30, 31. 



NEW YORK: X^S'/A'pTO^ - 

D. APPLETON & COMPANYr^ 
549 and 551 Broadway. 
1872. 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1872, by 
Rev. HENRY COWLES, D.D., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington, D. C. 



PREFACE. 



Any just interpretation of the scriptures must assume that they 
were written so as to be readily understood by the average mind 
of their first readers. Especially must this be true of compositions 
prepared for the public worship of the sanctuary, to be sung or 
listened to by minds of the ordinary grade of culture, such as 
were the masses of the Hebrew worshiping congregations. It 
follows that these Psalms will become plain to us just so far as 
we are able to place ourselves in the circumstances of their authors 
and of the people of their age. To do this requires a good 
knowledge of their language; also a familiar acquaintance with 
their history and life, and, so far as possible, with the special 
history that belongs to each of these several Psalms— embraced 
under the questions of author ; date ; the occasion of its being writ- 
ten — the facts to which it alludes ; and the purpose or object had 
in view by the author.— — These remarks will indicate the points 
to which special attention has been given in the preparation of 
these Notes. I have sought diligently to locate these several 
Psalms in history as one of the first and most important means 
of reproducing the circumstances under which they were written. 
A table in the Appendix presents very briefly the leading points 
of this external history of the Psalms. More extended discussions 

will be found introducing each Psalm. 1 have also aimed in 

my Notes to represent the exact shades of thought expressed in 
the original Hebrew, especially when the received English version 

(iii) 



iv 



PEEFACE. 



fails of this expression. More extended discussion has been al- 
lowed to the Psalms which are at once difficult, controverted, and 
important, e. g., those which are supposed to be prophetic of the 
Messiah, and also those which have been sometimes arraigned as 
expressing malign imprecations against the Psalmist's enemies. 
The bearing of the practical points upon Christian experi- 
ence and upon the great moral duties of man to his Maker are 

touched briefly and suggestively — not exhaustively. With the 

prayerful hope that these Notes will shed light on points other- 
wise dark, and possibly disclose beauties and truths otherwise 
unnoticed, and thus secure a deeper and more intelligent interest 
and a richer profit to the diligent study of these sweet songs of 
Zion, this volume is respectfully laid before the public, being 
"designed for both pastors and people," 

BY THE AUTHOR. 

Oberlin, Onio, March, 1S72. 



PSALMS. 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 

The Psalms were written and were compiled into their present 
form for use in the public worship of God in the Jewish sanctuary. 
From a very early age poetry and song were called into service to 
express with greater pleasure and profit the sentiments and emo- 
tions of pious men toward their Infinite Father. Their aid was 
invoked in sacred worship. The earliest sacred song on record 
was prepared by Moses and sung by the children of Israel over 
the fall of Pharaoh and his army in the Eed Sea. We have it 

Exod. 15: 1-21. If the question be asked, Why did the leaders 

of Israel under those circumstances think in poetry and utter 
their thought in song? It may fitly be answered, Because their 
hearts were full, and their full hearts must pour forth their emo- 
tions, and would have the help of poetry and song. Nothing less 
would suffice. Warm, fervent emotion demands such expression, 
and refuses to be satisfied without it. Those saved men and 
women could not help uttering praise to Almighty God for his 
strong hand uplifted to their salvation. Their excited minds de- 
lighted to lift their thought to the loftiest conceptions of the im- 
agination [which is to make poetry], and such praise, put in poetry, 
yet needed the aid of music in song. No other style of speech 
than poetry could fitly express their exultant, lofty triumph in 
Him, and no other utterance of poetry could do justice to their 
emotions save that in song. This is the ultimate answer to all 
questions as to the origin of sacred song. It is the natural ex- 
pression of deep and strong emotion. Deep feeling finds relief, 
as well as pleasing culture and development, in the language of 

poetry and in music. Somewhat later, poetry and song appear 

in their triumphal form in the history of Deborah and Barak; and 
in the minor key over the death of Saul and Jonathan. How large 
a place they held in the stated worship of God in the tabernacle 



2 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



before the age of David we have no means of knowing. The his- 
toric records bring sacred song to view only on special occasions. 
To David is, doubtless, due the credit of reviving, and, by exam- 
ple and impulse, almost creating the psalmody of Israel. His soul 
was full of song, and, indeed, of poetry as well. He entered into 
the worship and the praises of God with all his heart, and, there- 
fore, found poetry and song congenial to his own spirit. Hence, he 
naturally inferred that the same means would promote the devo- 
tions of his people. Sacred history makes frequent allusion to 

his skill and power upon the harp. But not content with the 
harp alone, he invented other instruments of music, and enjoined 
their use in sacred song. "Four thousand Levites praised the 
Lord with the instruments which I made" (said David) "to praise 
therewith" (1 Chron. 23: 5). The prophet Amos (6: 5) speaks 
of those who tl invent to themselves instruments of music like 
David." One historian (1 Chron. 25 : 5, 6) says of the develop- 
ment of Hebrew song: "God gave Heman fourteen sons and three 
daughters " (a family of singers); " all these were under the hand 
of their father for song in the house of the Lord, with cymbals, 
psalteries, and harps, for the service of the house of God, accord- 
ing to the king's order to Asaph, Jeduthun, and Heman." Not 
inappropriately David bears the distinctive honor of being " the 
sweet Psalmist of Israel" (2 Sam. 23: 1). Well might he speak 
of it as his chief glory : " The Spirit of the Lord spake by me, 
and his word was in my tongue " (2 Sam. 23 : 1-3). To him, and 
to his associates and successors, is the world indebted, under God, 
for these treasures of sacred song. It is a vast debt. The treas- 
ures are, beyond measure, rich and precious. They witness to 
the deep Christian emotion of good men who lived three thou- 
sand years ago. Here are their experiences, their trials, their 
straits, their conflicts against temptation ; and here, also, are the 
records of their precious faith in God, through which they gained 
the victory over the world and the wickedness thereof. Here 
stand recorded their exultant songs of triumph in the day of 
their deliverance ; here the outflowings of their grateful hearts in 
praise to the power that redeemed, and to the loving-kindness that 
remembered, them with plenteousness of mercy and salvation. 
These forms of uttering devout affection are so. rich, so full, and 
so various, that Christians in all ages have delighted to find here 
the very words prepared to their hand in which their souls, bur- 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



3 



dened or lightened, might speak before the Lord of their wants, 
or of the fullness of their joy when those wants were supplied. It 
is not strange that Christians in all later ages should feel peculiar 
interest in using these words in their own worship, public or 
private, to express similar feelings. It will always be pleasant to 
think that God moved holy men of old to these utterances of 
earthly want, of faith in God for promised help, and of thanks 
for delivering grace. We unconsciously account their experience 
of God's mercy as his pledge of like mercy to his people in every 
age under their similar wants, and in answer to the same faith 
and prayer for like help in time of need. 

In our Hebrew Bibles, the Psalms are divided into five looks— 
the closing Psalm in each of the five respectively being the forty- 
first, the seventy-second, the eighty-ninth, the one hundred and 
sixth, and the one hundred and fiftieth. Remarkably, these 
Psalms end with a special doxology — the first three with a 
double A men, and the last two with Hallelujah. This arrange- 
ment is, probably, as old as the compilation of the Psalter itself. 

It may not be possible to give, with certainty, all the reasons 

which induced the compilers to arrange these Psalms in this five- 
fold division, and the several Psalms in their order, as we have 
them in each book. It is, however, generally conceded that the 
first book (Ps. 1-41) is composed entirely of Psalms of David, 
and was compiled first in the order of time, and, probably, soon 
after David's death. The second book (42-72) involves the diffi- 
cult question whether, in case of Ps. 42-49, the superscription 
"for [or " of"] the sons of Korah" names them as authors or as 
musical performers. I favor the opinion that they are spoken of 
as authors. The series Ps. 51-71 were manifestly written by David. 
The 72d and 45th are usually attributed to Solomon. Inasmuch 
as Ps. 46 belongs, probably, to the reign of Hezekiah, it may be 
assumed that this second book was compiled at or near this date. 
The statement (Ps. 72 : 20), " The prayers of David the son of 
Jesse are ended," seems to show that the compiler supposed that 
no more Psalms of David were extant. Yet one Psalm ascribed to 
him appears in the third book (Ps. 86), and seventeen in Books IV 
and Y, viz. : Psalms 101, 103, 108-110, 122, 124, 131, 133, 138-145. 

Book III apparently comprises, for the most part, Psalms pre- 
pared and brought into use in and near the time of Hezekiah. 

Book IV contains the remainder of the Psalms that appeared 



4 



GENEEAL INTRODUCTION. 



down to the time of the captivity — chiefly of the age of Josiah 
and Jeremiah ; and Book V those which were either written or 
brought forward from an earlier age after the restoration. 

It thus appears that this hook of Psalms, as we have it, was a 
growth — the accumulation of religious odes composed during the 
lapse of several centuries, and hence a natural product of the 
piety and talent on the one hand, and of providential circum- 
stances on the other, which make up the religious history of the 
covenant people during those most favored ages of their national life. 

The interest felt in this subject will justify a somewhat more 
full development. Let us compare Jewish Psalmody with Chris- 
tian in point of historic growth. It is well known that Christian 
Psalmody has been largely the product of special epochs ; e. g., 
we have one installment from the early Christian centuries — the 
work of the fathers in that memorable Christian age. We have 
another installment from the pious men of the middle ages — Ber- 
nard, Aquinas, etc. Some contributions come in from the age of 
the German reformation ; more and richer still for our mother 
tongue, from the revivals of the eighteenth century — the age of 
the Wesleys, Watts, Cowper, and Doddridge ; and, finally, an im- 
mense accession from the quickened piety and the missionary zeal 
of the nineteenth century. Comprehensively our Christian Psalm- 
ody has been the natural product of revival periods. The same 

is true of Jewish Psalmody. The age of David was remarkably 
one of religious revival. An earnestly pious king became under 
God the means of a quickened religious life among the people. 
True, it took on to some extent a martial tone, and developed itself 
in the faith and heroism of bloody wars against the idolatrous 
enemies of Israel ; but it was none the less a revival of the re- 
ligious element, and manifested itself delightfully in the public 
worship of the sanctuary. Sacred song became a necessity to 
supply the natural want of so much quickened religious emo- 
tion ; so here we have the first installment of Psalms and odes 

suitable for public religious worship. The next religious epoch, 

fruitful in fresh songs for the sanctuary, was precisely the next 
considerable reformation, viz., that under Jehoshaphat. The great 
military event of his time, sketched so vigorously in 2 Chron. 20, 
gave occasion, apparently, to two very stirring odes (Ps. 47 and 48, 
and, perhaps, Ps. 83). The second book of Psalms (42-72) was 
probably brought together and added to the Psalter shortly after 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



5 



this revival period. More extensive and thorough still was the 

great reformation under Hezekiah. It sent forth its inviting call 
to the long-time wandering brethren of the ten tribes — a fact 
which manifests itself in some of the new songs of this king's 
reign. The fall of the proud Assyrian before Jehovah's uplifted 
arm gave occasion, as we might anticipate, to other and most sub- 
lime songs for the sanctuary. The age of Isaiah, of Micah, and 
of Nahum, might be expected to make very considerable additions 
to the Psalmody of Israel. Of this we find ample traces as we 
study the historic dates of the Psalms, especially of Book III, 
which book may have been compiled near the close of Hezekiah's 

reign. The reign of Josiah dates the next great reformation, 

and became, consequently, the epoch of the next considerable ac- 
cession to Jewish Psalmody. A very large portion of Book IV 
must be dated within this reign and the life of Jeremiah and 
Habakkuk, extending into the earlier years of the captivity. 
The power of Isaiah's prophetic thought and spirit appear in 
some of the odes of this age, as we shall have occasion to notice. 

Lastly, the revived spirit and life of the restoration under 

Zerubbabel, Joshua, Ezra, Nehemiah, Haggai, and Zechariah, 
gave birth to the last contribution to the volume of Jewish Psalm- 
ody. These contributions appear in Book V (Ps. 107-150). 

Thus, comprehensively, we have the instructive historic fact that 
religious revivals have, for the most part, given birth to the re- 
ligious songs of all ages; first, the Jewish, last, the Christian. 

The more particular questions pertaining to the author and 
date of each Psalm must be examined in connection with their 
exposition. These questions have great interest and very consid- 
erable importance. If these points can be satisfactorily ascer- 
tained, they enable us to reproduce, in a measure, the history and 
the circumstances under which each Psalm was written. In so 
far as we are able to reproduce those circumstances, we shall see 
more clearly the pertinence and beauty, and shall feel more deeply 
the force, of the allusions made to events then passing. In order 
to feel as the Psalmist felt, we need to see his situation and to ap- 
preciate the circumstances by which he was surrounded. To bring 
out these circumstances in their just light is one of the first duties 
of the commentator, and one of his chief contributions to the ben- 
efit of his readers. 

This introduction ought not to close without some notice of an- 



6 



GENERAL INTRODUCTION. 



other point which the study of these Psalms will continually sug- 
gest, viz. : What illustrations and developments of God and of his 
truth had been then already made so as to be accessible for re- 
ligious culture ? In what shape were the waters of the spiritual 
life then flowing for the people of God ; where were the fountains 
thereof; and how could thirsty souls gain access and find their 

supply ? We of this Christian age find these fountains largely 

in the earthly life ; the loving words and promises ; the sacrificial 
death ; and the ever-manifested presence of Jesus through his 
Spirit. But they of the older Jewish age had these things only 
in the tiniest prophetic germ. Rarely in these Psalms do the 
writers seem to turn to these germs of prophetic truth for the 
quickening of their spiritual life. What did they do? What 
sources of religious instruction and of quickening impulse were 

accessible to them ? Comprehensively, they had two sources : 

(1). They saw God in creation and in nature. As we may, so 
might they look abroad of a starry night, and "consider the 
heavens the work of divine fingers" (Ps. 8); they could listen 
and hear the heavens "telling the glory of God" (Ps. 19). Or 
they could look forth upon the fresh face of the earth and see the 
valleys covered with corn, the pastures with flocks, and the hills 

girding on joy (Ps. 65). But (2) more and better than this, 

the long ages of God's covenant people had a history. God had 
come down and talked with men of faith, and had condescended 
to enter into covenant with them. He had given them his name 
"Jehovah" — the faithful God, the maker and fulfiller of promise. 
It is interesting to see how constantly the authors of these sacred 
songs fall back upon the revelations of God in history ; how nat- 
urally their thoughts recur to the promise of Canaan to the patri- 
archs, to the wonders wrought in fulfillment thereof in Egypt, at 
the Red Sea, in the desert, and in the conquest of Canaan ; how 
constantly their faith seeks and finds support in those marvelous 
" works " of the right hand of the Lord. At these fountains of 
truth they drank all along the otherwise unwatered desert of 
their earthly pilgrimage. These wonderful facts were good ma- 
terial to work into poetry and song as well as into the warp and 
woof of the religious life; and hence we shall not be surprised to 
find allusions made often, yet not too often- -allusions simple yet 
always impressive, and sometimes sublime — to those wonderful 
works of their own ever-faithful Jehovah. 



PSALMS. 



PSALM I. 

Obviously this Psalm was either written for an introduction to 
the Psalter or was selected by the compiler as one adapted to this 
place. There is no good reason to doubt that David was its author. 
It breathes forth and foreshadows the spirit of the entire book in 
this special respect, celebrating the blessedness and prosperity of 
the truly good man in this world and inferring his corresponding 
fruition in the world to come. He is put in contrast with the 

wicked both in his life and in his destiny. We shall often have 

occasion to notice that the sentiment of this Psalm has a somewhat 
special adaptation to that age of the world in which present retri- 
bution was far more the common law of God's providential admin- 
istration than it is in our times. 

1. Blessed is the man that walketh not in the counsel of 
the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth 
in the seat of the scornful. 

2. But his delight is in the law of the Lord ; and in his 
law doth he meditate day and night. 

The force of the original is better given by reading, "O, the 

blessedness of the man ! " or " 0, how blessed is the man ! " etc. 

He is first described negatively. He does " not walk in the counsel 
of the ungodly" — according to their principles and aims; does 
"not stand in the way of sinners," associating with them as being 
of kindred spirit ; does not sit in the seat of scorners. Standing, 
walking, sitting, as here used, group together all customary forms, 
not precisely of human activity but of social life, in none of which 
does this good man evince any co-operation or even sympathy with 
the wicked. On the other hand, considered positively, he has de- 
lights, yet they are not in the ways of the wicked, but in the law 
of the Lord : he has thought and study, yet not on themes congenial 
to the wicked, but upon the precious law of his God. In both his 

life and his thought, therefore, he is utterly unlike the wicked. 

The tense of the Hebrew verb in this verse is past, yet implying 

the present. Such has been his way of life ; such it is still. The 

(7) 



8 



PSALM I. 



reader will notice the underlying assumption throughout this Psalm 
that the outer life is a certain index of the inner heart. " A man 
is known by the company he keeps" — and loves. 

3. And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of 
water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season ; his leaf 
also shall not wither ; and whatsoever he doeth shall pros- 

0 Per. 

The charming figure of a tree, ever green, thrifty, flourishing 
and fruitful, sets forth his prosperity. In Palestine, vegetables of 
annual growth might fail through drought; but the tree (e. g. } the 
fig, olive, or palm), deep rooted, beside living waters, whose leaf 
never withered, and its fruit never failed, became a true type of 
the good man whose life could never be a failure — whose work was 

evermore sure to prosper and fruit well. The Hebrew words for 

"rivers of water" carry the mind to artificial channels cut for 
irrigation. The fact involves the labor and care of the husband- 
man, suggesting God's unceasing care in providence over his faith- 
ful servants. In the last clause, the figure gives place to the 

fact prefigured: " Whatsoever he shall do, he will make to prosper." 
The case of Joseph is in point. " The Lord made all that he did 
to prosper in his hand." " The Lord was with Joseph, and he was 

a prosperous man" (Gen. xxxix: 2, 3, 23). Perhaps it should 

be suggested that this connection between moral uprightness and 
external prosperity was more apparent and more invariable under 
the ancient economy than under the present. There were obvious 
reasons why a theocracy, so largely external in its relations, should 
involve a specially large amount of present retribution. Such Psalms 
as the thirty-seventh and such passages as Deut. 28, present these 
views forcibly. There are also obvious reasons why in the early 
ages of the race, the matter of righteous retribution from God 
should be both proved and illustrated to the very eyes of men, 
before God should say much in regard to retribution in another 
state beyond the grave, out of human sight. Else how could he 
hope to gain the confidence of men in any thing he might say 
about that unseen world ? 

4. The ungodly are not so: but are like the chaff which 
the wind driveth away. 

The ungodly are not so, either in their life, their spirit, or their 
destiny, for all these points seem to be involved in the contrast — 
the latter not least. They can not be compared to a tree, or even 
a shrub, or the tiniest of vegetable growths; but find their sym- 
bol in chaff, seen and known mainly as separated from the wheat, 
because not only worthless but injurious, and driven away, there- 
fore, before the winnowing wind on the hill-tops, or, as elsewhere 
suggested, burned in the fire of destruction. So the incorrigible 
sinners in God's universe must be violently torn away from among 
the righteous and doomed to hopeless ruin. Having proved them- 



PSALM I. 



9 



selves worthless, and even mischievous, in the sphere God made 
them to fill, their end must be as their works — their character 
giving shape to their destiny, which can only be destruction 

"without remedy." This figure, chaff, to describe the doom of 

the wicked, appears forcibly in Job 21: 18 and Ps. 35: 5; Isa. 
17 : 13, and, not least, in Matt. 3: 12. 

5. Therefore the ungodly shall not stand in the judg- 
ment, nor sinners in the congregation of the righteous. 

The question respecting the proper reference of the judgment, 
whether to providential judgments inflicted in this world, or to 
the final judgment-day when this world shall end, seems to be fitly 
answered by the demands of the context. The judgment here 
thought of is the same sifting, punitive, and destructive process 
set before us in v. 4 under the figure of u the chaff which the 
wind driveth away." As thought of by the Psalmist, its first in- 
stallment comes often in this world, yet so only as foreshadowing 
the far more dreadful doom which awaits the wicked hereafter. 
They are separated from the assemblies of the righteous (so the 
parallel clause affirms); they can never stand, i. e., stand up in 
strength and with the divine favor, before God in his days of judg- 
ment, whether in the present life or the future. Their doom is 
to be disowned of God, condemned, and made monuments of his 
eternal justice. 

6. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous : but 
the way of the ungodly shall perish. 

In the passage, " the Lord knoweth the way," etc., the leading 
thought seems to be upon that sure and perfect discrimination 
with which the Lord will sever between the righteous and the 
wicked. He knows perfectly how the righteous have lived, what 
spirit they are of, and what destiny he proposes to award to them 
in the end. He knoweth their " way " both of earthly life and of 
future reward. But the way of the ungodly is ruin, and noth- 
ing else. Their very way itself shall perish — a strong form of 
asserting that their path leads to perdition, and will surely land 
them there. Thus utterly unlike are the godly from the un- 
godly, in our world, and so it is infinitely right, and therefore 
sure, that their respective destines, as they are contrasted often in 
this world, will be far more certainly and totally so in the retribu- 
tions of the world to come. At the stand-point of view held by 
the Psalmist, the righteous were seen, not only upright and re- 
gardful of God's will, but happy and prosperous; while the 
wicked are seen mainly at the point of their final doom — u chaff 
which the wind driveth away," even in the retributions of the 
present world. It behooves us, at least, to make the momentous 
inference: If such be the contrast both in life and destiny be- 
tween the good and the bad in the partial developments and ret- 



10 



PSALM II. 



ributions of time, how much more fearful the contrast must be 
under the perfect judgment of the final and eternal state! 

PSALM II. 

This Psalm stands without the author's name, but must be as- 
cribed to David, for he is the author of all the other Psalms in 
this first book (1-41), and, therefore, doubtless of this. The im- 
agery is drawn from his own personal relations to God as king 
of Israel and from God's promise to him of the Messiah in the 
line of his children — a fact which witnesses to his authorship ; 
and, finally, it is specifically attributed to him by the apostles 
(Acts 4: 25): "Who by the mouth of thy servant David hast 
suid, Why did the heathen rage?" etc. — as in this Psalm. As to 
its date, we need only say, after the scenes of 2 Sam. 7, and prob- 
ably not long after. The Psalm treats, not (as some have claimed) 
of David nor of any other ancient Jewish king, but of the Messiah 
alone. Its imagery and phraseology are indeed drawn from the 
case of David anointed as king over Israel on Mount Zion, and 
raised up of God to subdue the adjacent hostile nations; but we 
must refer the Psalm to the Messiah and not to David, because, 
(1.) It can not apply throughout to David without the utmost 
violence ; (2.) It does apply to the Messiah fitly, naturally, and in 
harmony with numerous other Messianic prophecies ; and (3.) Ic 
is explicitly referred to the Messiah by the inspired apostles (as 
above, Acts 4: 25-28), where they find the raging of the nations 
and the combination of kings against the Lord's anointed fulfilled 
in the gathering together of Herod, Pilate, the Romans, and the 
Jews, to crucify the Lord Jesus. Also the repeated reference to 
v. 7, "Thou art my Son;" e. g., Heb. 1: 5 and 5: 5, and Acts 
12: 33, and the remarkable announcement of the fact at his bap- 
tism and transfiguration, as shown in Matt. 3: 17 and 17: 5; and, 
yet further, the reference to v. 9 in Rev. 2: 27 and 12: 5. The 
proof is most abundant that the inspired apostles saw the Messiah, 
and him only, throughout this Psalm. Appealing to it in proof 
that Jesus of Nazareth is the very Messiah of Old Testament 
prophecy, of course they assume this to be a prophecy of him. 
In a case of such vital moment, where the points to be proved are 
entirely fundamental to Christianity, to deny the authority of the 
apostles as interpreters of prophecy is to deny their inspiration. 

The course of thought in this Psalm has extraordinary brilliancy, 
beauty, and force. The prophet sees the nations combining in 
hostile mood against the Lord's anointed (vs. 1, 2) ; hears the 
very words that breathe forth their spirit of rebellion (v. 3); 
then sees the Almighty reposing serenely on his lofty throne, con- 
demning the puny endeavors of his foes, speaking terror to their 
hearts, and affirming the regal authority of his anointed Son (vs. 



PSALM II. 



11 



4-6). Then the Son himself appears, witnessing in the very 
words of the Infinite Father to his own supreme dominion (vs. 7- 
9), upon the basis of which the Psalm closes with a solemn ad- 
monition from the prophet to yield in submission, obedience, and 
love to this glorious Messiah, and thus escape the ruin of all per- 
sistent rebels and gain the blessedness of an humble trust in his 
name. 

1. Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a 
vain thing ? 

The nations are seen all astir and deeply agitated with the spirit 
of rebellion against the Lord Jehovah. Why is this? says the 
prophet ; of what use ; and what can be the reason for these vain 
endeavors ? The original implies that they have been and still are 
raging in their tumultuous eftorts ; are now plotting and will con- 
tinue to plot this utterly futile and self-ruinous rebellion. As seen 
in vision these rebels are the nations and peoples of the earth. 
The prophet is deeply impressed with the folly and madness of 
their opposition against the great God. 

2. The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers 
take counsel together, against the Lord, and against his 
Anointed, saying, 

This verse explains their case more fully. They take their 
stand and devise their schemes against Jehovah and against his 

anointed Son. The original word here is Messiah — the Anointed 

One, to which the word Christ is the Greek equivalent. The idea 
of anointing comes from the Hebrew practice of inducting their 
high priests and their kings into office by this ceremony. The his- 
tory gives prominence to the anointing of Saul (1 Sam. 10: 1), 
of David (1 Sam. 16 : 13), and of Solomon (1 Kings 1 : 34, 39) ; 
and says of David, " The Spirit of the Lord came upon David 
from that day forward." Anointing was the symbol of this 
divine unction, and, therefore, makes the names Messiah and 
Christ specially significant and appropriate in the case of him 
to whom God gave the Spirit " not by measure." 

3. Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their 
cords from us. 

The prophet first sees these hostile kings and nations in the 
tumult of their rebellious plans and movements; then with a 
deeper view of their spirit he hears their very words. They 
spurn the restraints of God's authority. " We will not have this 
man to reign over us." The Messiah, anointed king in Zion, to 
rule with most mild and beneficent sway, " his yoke easy and his 
burden light," they intensely hate and scornfully repel. Alas ! for 
the folly and the guilt of such rebellion ! It is precisely sin — 
sin in its very nature and essence ; the heart lifting up itself 
against the perfectly reasonable authority and most righteous 



12 



PSALM II. 



claims of the infinite God, and none the less for his inexpressible 
goodness and perfect purity; none the less because he is our 
Great Maker and Father — the glorious giver of every good. 
Against such a God rebellion is simple madness — the madness, 
not of real insanity, but of supreme folly. 

4. He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord 
shall have them in derision. 

Is Jehovah afraid of this uprising of rebellion? The prophet 
sees him sitting in the heavens, infinitely high above the reach of 
their puny arm, not agitated like those raging foes, but serene 
and undisturbed ; indeed, looking with contempt upon these puny 
and really contemptible swellings of rage in creatures so insig- 
nificant. It need not surprise us that the rage of the wicked 
against God should appear in his view contemptible for its infi- 
nite weakness. If it were not that his pity deplores its wickedness, 
how could he have any other feeling than contempt for its utter 
imbecility and folly? He might even enjoy the thought of his 
own infinite power to make the wrath of man work out his own 
praise and the good of his universe. Apart from the divine pity 
for the sinner, a just sense of sin, as the puny, abortive, and mad 
uprising of man against the infinite God, would Jegitiinately 
awaken the very feeling here expressed. Let every guilty sinner 
think of it and be confounded in the thought of his own unutter- 
able folly as well as guilt. 

5. Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex 
them in his sore displeasure. 

6. Yet have I set my King upon my holy hill of Ziou. 
From describing what the Lord does, the prophet passes to what 

he says. Filled with indignation toward these adversaries of his 
Anointed Son, he will speak to them in his wrath and will terrify 
them in his stern displeasure. The word for "vex" has rather 
this sense of striking terror into their guilty souls by the assertion 
of his divine purpose to enthrone his Son in Zion and give him 
the nations as his subjects— all persistent rebels to be broken 
with a rod of iron. This is the amount of his solemn declara- 
tion : I have enthroned my Son as king on Zion, my holy mount- 
ain. I have done it : no mortal power can undo or withstand it ! 
"He must reign till he shall have put all enemies beneath his 
feet!" The reader will notice that David's anointing and inau- 
guration furnish the imagery and the phraseology ; yet none but 
the Messiah fills the sense. 

7. I will declare the decree: the Lord hath said unto 
me, Thou art my Son ; this day have I begotten thee. 

With inimitable beauty and pertinence the Messiah himself 
now appears and speaks, witnessing to his sonship and kingship, 
and to the constitution — the grand charter of rights — under which 



PSALM II. 



13 



this fallen world is given to him as his empire. "Let me speak 
now concerning the decree," (Heb.)— the great ordinance or statute 
of heaven under which the Son of God is enthroned as king. 
" Jehovah said to me, My Son art thou : this day have I begotten 

thee." Obviously sonship is here thought of as the ground of 

kingship — the son succeeding rightfully to the father's authority 
as king. "This day have I made thee such," recognizing thy son- 
ship by giving thee this authority of king. Construing the 

language thus in harmony with the drift of the context, there 
seems to be no occasion here to raise any metaphysical questions 
respecting the eternal generation of the Son of God. Can it be 
supposed that the Psalmist or even the Spirit of inspiration, 
speaking through him, had any reference to the birth-hour of the 
Messiah, considered as the time when his existence began? 
The plain thought seems rather to be: This day, by anointing 
thee as King on my hill of Zion, I have recognized thee as my 
Son. This enthroning is my public and solemn recognition of this 
relation — the relation being essentially eternal in the past, but 
never brought forth to the knowledge of created minds till this 
momentous inauguration as king. So Paul understood this verse, 
for he finds it fulfilled in Christ's resurrection and consequent 
ascension and enthronement in heaven. (See Acts 13: 33). 

8. Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine 
inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy 
possession. 

Having been proclaimed king, the next step is the dower of a 
kingdom. Who are to be his subjects, and on what conditions 
shall the new king receive them ? To these points our verse speaks. 
His subjects are the nations of the earth, the same obviously who 
# are seen in the opening of the vision as raging against his au- 
thority. Given to him in answer to prayer, and moreover given 
him as his inheritance and possession in the sense in which 
Israel was God's inheritance and his peculiar people, they must 
be considered here as given him to become mainly his submissive, 
trustful, and beloved people. It can not be supposed that the grand 
charter of Messiah's great commission signifies only this — The 
nations given to thee as thine own, only or mainly to destroy 
them. Jesus himself would teach us far otherwise than this: — 
" The Son of man is not come to destroy men's lives, but to save 
them" (Luke 9 : 56). " God sent not his Son into the world to 
condemn the world; but that the world through him might be 
saved" (John 3: 17). The apparently different view given in the 

next verse (v. 9) will be considered in its place. Next as to 

the conditions of this gift. "Ask of me." If it be your desire, 
all the nations shall be yours. Nothing thou canst ask is too 
much for thy rich Father to give. May we suppose that this ex- 
pressed condition follows the usage of royal fathers conferring 
royalty and its munificent gifts upon favored sons; or perhaps, 



14 



PSALM II. 



that it comes from the case of David himself, raised up of God 
to be successful in subduing the nations to his scepter according 
to the faith he should have in the infinite resources of Israel's 
God? However the phraseology may be accounted for, we may 
best take the obvious meaning for the true one, viz. : that in the 
legitimate sense in which Jesus offers prayer to the Father, this 
asking was truly the antecedent condition of his receiving this 
largest possible gift — the nations en masse, the people of the wide 
earth, for his inheritance and possession. " The kingdoms of this 
world to become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ" 
[anointed]. As already said, these nations* are the same 
whom the prophet saw (v. 1) raging in their rebellion against 
the Lord. Given to Christ, they will come under his royal 
sway — sweetly submissive and joyfully reposing in his pardoning 
love if they will; but terribly destroyed if they persist in mad 
rebellion. This is the constant teaching of Christ and of his 
apostles : " He that believeth shall be saved ; he that believeth 
not shall be damned." "To you who believe he is precious; but 
to them who are disobedient, a stone of stumbling ' — to stumble 

over to their fatal fall. Elsewhere the Scriptures indicate that 

Christ's people when they come into real and full sympathy with 
him, blend their prayers with his as conditions precedent for the 
conversion of the nations to Christ 

9. Thou shalt break them with a rod of iron ; thou shalt 
dash them in pieces like a potter's vessel. 

Some readers will ask : Is it not the fair sense of this verse that 
all the nations promised to Christ as his inheritance and possession 

are given him only to be destroyed? To this I answer: It is 

probably due in part to the salient points of David's own sway 
over the hostile nations — Philistia, Syria, Moab, Ammon and • 
Edom— that the language of this verse contemplates the subject 
nations as being crushed by physical power rather than saved by 
moral. Moreover, this view is in keeping with the leading thought 
of the Psalm — these nations seen in their malign rage against Je- 
hovah and his anointed Son ; and the Lord asserting his infinite 
right to reign, and giving dominion to his Son that he may reign 
to the subjugation of every foe. This is one of the main points in 
this Psalm. Yet as shown above, v. 8 must contemplate the masses 
of the nations as converted, to become Christ's true inheritance. 
The last three verses assume most clearly and delightfully that 
there is mercy most abundant for the guiltiest rebel who will sub- 
mit to Christ and be a rebel no more. These " terrors of the 
Lord" are here for the very purpose of persuading men to be wise 

and to submit while yet pardon is possible. The verse before us 

must therefore by no means be construed as proving that the 
nations of the world are given to Christ only or even mainly to 



PSALM II. 



15 



be destroyed. We can not even infer from this Psalm that the lost 
will be the mass, and the saved the few isolated exceptions. It 
should be borne in mind that David is a foreshadowing type of 
Christ, not as to every point in his mission and work, but only as to 
some special points, and these, mainly the points made prominent 
in this Psalm. David reigned on Zion hill — a king in most respects 
after the very heart of God ; yet mostly representing the Great 
Messiah, not as an atoning Lamb ; not as a Savior pardoning sin- 
ners; not as developing a glorious moral power for the conversion 
of enemies to friends ; not as bringing forth to human view the 
matchless love of God, and sending his Spirit to make this mani- 
fested love a power to melt hearts of stone to flesh ; — but quite in 
another line, viz., to subdue hostile nations by the strong arm of 
war, causing God's chosen people to rest in peace from foreign 
assailants ; and then reviving the worship of God in his earthly 
sanctuary and ruling in righteousness for the general prosperity 
of the land. At the era of David, God had work for a warrior- 
chieftain who should be strong in the Lord to put down the ene- 
mies of Israel; and hence it was in those aspects mainly that he 
stands here as the representative of King Messiah. But this does 
not even propose to give us the chief work of the Messiah — much 
less, the whole. Beyond all question, the doctrine of the entire 
Bible, the New Testament and the Old, is that Jesus becomes King 
and Lord of all, to bring rebels to penitence and penitent souls 
back to purity and blessedness; but to give the incorrigibly im- 
penitent their righteous doom — remediless ruin. Who will not 
bow in submission must fall beneath his rod. Justice demands 
this and Jesus will execute it. Whosoever will may come to him 

for life ; but whosoever will not have life must have death !- It 

suffices therefore to say of our passage and indeed of the whole 
Psalm that it contemplates as its main theme the case of Christ's 
enemies in hostile league against him, but sure to fall beneath his 
rod unless they will bow to his scepter. The moral purpose of the 
Psalm is to impress the wicked with fear of the world's great King 
and Lord, and to assure them that their wrath and rage against 
him are worse than vain — there being nothing but absolute ruin 
before them in that line of policy, and their only hope lying in 
prompt submission. 

10. Be wise now therefore, O ye kings : be instructed, 
ye judges of the earth. 

11. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with tremb- 
ling. 

With such views of the ineffable majesty and power of King 
Messiah before the mind, nothing can be more appropriate than 
this exhortation to be wise and to bow submissively to his scepter. 
It is addressed specially to the kings and judges of the same 
nations who are seen in the opening verses in hostile stand against 
the Lord's anointed. To become wise implies (and most truly) 



16 



PSALM III. 



that sin is pure folly — senseless, irrational. "Be instructed;" — 
consent to take advice and give heed to wise counseL " Serve the 
Lord" reverently, with becoming fear of his dread judgments : — 
so may ye rejoice (with hope) in his forgiving mercy, for the issues 
are momentous, and a trembling solicitude befits men coming back 
from such rebellion. Mingled emotions of hope and of fear are 
surely not inappropriate. 

12. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and ye perish from 
the way, when his wrath is kindled but a little. Blessed 
are all they that put their trust in him. 

"Kiss the Son," according to the usage of those times in recog- 
nition of royal state. So Samuel poured anointing oil upon Saul's 
head, and kissed him, saying, "Is it not because the Lord hath 
anointed thee to be captain over his inheritance?" (1 Sam. 10: 
1.) "Lest he be angry" — if ye refuse him this rightful homage. 
"And ye perish from the way" — failing of the way of life; or, 
perhaps, perishing in your path, just where ye are walking, i. e., 

suddenly. In the next clause the translation, " when his wrath 

is kindled but a little," fails to give the sense of the original. 
The word for "when" usually means "for" indicating the reason 
why. And the word translated " but a little," much more natu- 
rally relates to time than to the degree of this enkindling. For 
his wrath kindles soon, suddenly, within a little. This is a most 
forcible reason for immediate submission to his sway. He does 
not bear long with persistent, abusive rebels. The honor and 
stability of his throne can not endure such insult beyond a certain 
brief limit of long-suffering. It is death to abuse his patience 
beyond that brief limit. With no delay give him the submission 
of your hearts, lest ye fall, never to rise — fall in your very path- 
way ; for his wrath kindles suddenly. " Blessed are all they 

who put their trust in him;" and this blessedness may be yours, 
in place of that doom of woe and ruin. It becomes yours as the 
fruit of true submission to Messiah's sway. 

Thus closes this sublime and solemnly impressive Psalm. Com- 
paring it with the first Psalm, it ends where that begins — with the 
blessedness of the righteous. Like that, it makes prominent the 
heaven-wide contrast between the righteous and the wicked in re- 
spect to both present condition and future destiny. Like that, its 
great moral purpose is to commend true piety; to dissuade men 
from the ways of sin and rebellion ; and to press them to sub- 
mission to God as the path of life and blessedness. 

OO^O* 

PSALM III. 

The introduction, "A Psalm of David when he fled from Absa- 
lom his son," opens this Psalm, and may properly be considered a 



PSALM III. 



17 



part of it. These introductory clauses, prefixed to a large portion 
of the Psalms, stand in the Hebrew text; were probably written 
by the several authors or by the original compilers, more probably 
the latter; and are regarded, for the most part, as historically re- 
liable. They usually give us the very facts we need in order to 
locate the writing of the Psalm in the author's personal history 

and experience. In the present case, the rebellion of Absalom, 

the uprising of the people under him, and its utter failure, find 
place in the historical books (2 Sam. 15-19). Far along in the 
forty years' reign of David (the precise date not given), after his 
sons had reached the years if not the maturity of manhood, and 
after the infirmities of age had induced, apparently, some negli- 
gence in his judicial duties, Absalom, a fast young man, of pre-pos- 
sessing person and ambitious soul, ingratiating himself into favor 
with the people (in the language of the historian), " stole their 
hearts," and then made a bold dash for the throne itself. The 
masses of the people (strangely, perhaps heedlessly) lent them- 
selves to this conspiracy. David thought it prudent to flee from 
his royal city, to rally his friends on the east of the Jordan, and 
stake his kingdom on the fortunes of a field-battle. In the result 
God gave him victory, a penitent people, a firmer throne, and a 
new experience of his own enduring love. At what point in this 
series of events we are to locate the writing of this Psalm is not 
entirely clear; but, apparently, most of it before the final victory 
over the hosts of Absalom and while yet the exiled monarch was 
walking, not by sight, but alone by faith in Israel's God. 

1. Lord, how are they increased that trouble me ! many 
are they that rise up against me. 

2. Many there be which say of my soul, TJiere is no help 
for him in God. Selah. 

The first and most painful impression forced upon David's heart 
under the fearful tidings of this rebellion was of its wide extent — 
the many thousands of Israel who had madly rushed into it and 
set themselves against his throne. " There came a messenger to 
David, saying, The hearts of the men of Israel are after Absalom " 
(2.Sam. 15 : 13). The sudden flight from the city assumes that the 
masses of the people are in this rebellion. The language of Hushai 
to Absalom in council implies it: "Whom this people and all the 
men of Israel choose (i. e., for their king) his will I be," etc. (2 
Sam. 16 : 18). " Therefore, I counsel that all Israel be generally 
gathered together unto thee, from Dan even to Beersheba, as the 
sand that is by the sea for multitude," etc. (2 Sam. 17 : 11). This 
was indeed a terrible crisis. A nation rising in arms against 
their legal sovereign; the head man in this rebellion a son 
against his own father ! Then, also, more painful than all the 
rest, was the irreligious aspect of this uprising; for David was the 
anointed of the Lord, and the spirit of the rebels stands out in 
the words he puts into their mouths: "There is no salvation for 



IS 



PSALM III. 



the old king in his God!" How fast the various and sometimes 
conflicting thoughts must have flashed through David's mind! 
Of the one sort were his comforting assurance that God did cer- 
tainly call him from leading his father's flocks to be the leader 
and shepherd of his people; that this same God had many a 
time delivered him from trouble and given him peace and rest de- 
spite of bitter and mighty foes ; and that he had in the main hon- 
estly sought to serve the Lord his God. But other thoughts would 
flash upon him — of his great sin in the matter of Bathsheba; of 
his ungodly son Amnon, murdered by a brother's hand, even the 
hand of this very Absalom, of his own body begotten, now a 
traitor, with no fear of God before his eyes — suffered in divine Prov- 
idence to become a terrible scourge to the kingdom, the household, 
and the heart of this aged king. Did these naturally appalling 
facts suggest the heart-sinking fear that his God had forsaken 

him? Hear what he says: "Lord" — i. e., O, thou Jehovah, the 

ever-faithful God, the God of our fathers in all the ages past — 
"Behold, and see how many there are now in this uprising against 
me ! " Hear them say, " His.God will save him no longer ! " Surely 
thou wilt mark the spirit of these words, so painful to me; so 
reproachful to thee. " Selah " calls for a pause in the recita- 
tion or chanting of the Psalm, inviting the reader to reflection 
and the choir (it is supposed) to a rest in the musical perform- 
ance. 

3. But thou, O Lord, art a shield for me : my glory, 
and the lifter up of mine head. 

His faith fails not. Though the nation seems to be in arms 
against him, and his own son heads them in this rebellion, still he 
will believe in the Lord his God. Thou, O most faithful One, 
hast been and art still my buckler all round about me, covering 
my whole person from the deadly shafts of battle; thou art my 
glory in whom I have rejoiced and even exulted as my greatest 
and best Friend ; thou hast been evermore the lifter up of my 
head, when else I must have sunk to rise no more: certainly I 
must, I will trust in thee in this terrible emergency! 

4. I cried unto the Lord with my voice, and he heard 
me out of his holy hill. Selah. 

The original gives us the verb "cried" in the future 
tense, implying his settled purpose evermore to cry to God for 
help in his trouble. "I said, With my voice to the Lord will I 
cry;" and "then he heard me from his holy hill." According to 
the form and the spirit of the ancient system, all pious suppliants 
turned toward Zion hill as the dwelling-place of their God. To 
them he manifested himself there, even as under the gospel age, 
we think of God as manifesting himself in Christ and we turn to 
him for his help in time of need. Here another pause is appro- 
priate for reflection. 



PSALM III. 



19 



5. I laid me down and slept ; I awaked ; for the Lord 
sustained me. 

In form this seems to be a statement made after the scene had 
passed. In spirit it is most expressive of the calmness and repose 
that came of his faith in God. In such peril of life and under 
the immense responsibilities of a king for his whole people, a very 
slight wavering in his faith would let in such apprehension and 
consequent agitation as must have banished sleep. But he testi- 
fies of himself — "I laid me down and slept sweetly: I awoke re- 
freshed; for the Lord sustained me." This reminds us of his 
words elsewhere — "Thou preparedst a table before me in the 
presence of my enemies" — so that I ate quietly in the very face of 
their array against me (Ps. 23 : 5). 

6. I will not be afraid of ten thousands of people, that 
have set themselves against me round about. 

"With God on my side and his resources of wisdom and power 
pledged in my behalf, I will not fear those myriads of people 
whom the chiefs in this rebellion have set against me on every 
side. The word "themselves" is without authority. The orig- 
inal rather implies that these ten thousands of people were put in 
this hostile attitude by others — the leaders in this conspiracy. 

7. Arise, O Lord ; save me, O my God : for thou hast 
smitten all mine enemies upon the cheek bone ; thou hast 
broken the teeth of the ungodly. 

"Arise" — as if he had been sitting in repose while this terrible 
conspiracy was being concocted; but the straitened suppliant 

feels that now he must implore God's interposition for help. 

"Save me, O my God;" mine by covenant; mine by the full 
choice of my soul ; mine by long years of trustful service on my 
part and precious mercies on thine. For 1 have this assurance 
of relief to-day, that thou hast ofttimes interposed to smite down 

my foes; therefore thou surely wilt again. Smiting on the 

cheek and breaking in the teeth, conceive of his enemies as savage 
beasts of prey whose terribleness lay in their powerful jaws and 
piercing teeth. To break these teeth thoroughly was to disarm 
them for mischief. So God had disabled his enemies. 

8. Salvation belongeth unto the Lord : thy blessing is 
upon thy people. Selah. 

Salvation is of the Lord : it cometh evermore from him alone ! 
From him it does surely come to his waiting children in all times 

of need. Most pertinently this sweet Psalm closes with the 

prayer — " Thy blessing be upon thy people ! " So be it evermore ! 
God the salvation of his people forever and ever ! 

Of the many thousands along the ages who have read or sung 
this Psalm, making its precious words of faith and prayer their 



20 



PSALM IV. 



own, but very few have been in circumstances of want and peril 
so severe and extreme as those of David. Making all due allow- 
ance for the fact that each one's own trials seem to himself of the 
very sternest sort, it must yet be obvious to our reason that as to 
most of us, our enemies are few while David's were many ; our 
perils trivial, while his were real and fearful; the strain upon 
equanimity in our case ought to be small, while in his it was 
prodigious. Then let us consider that the grace which proved 
so adequate for him must be infinitely ample for each one of us. 

PSALM IV. 

This Psalm corresponds with Ps. 3 so closely both in its general 
course of thought and in several special expressions (compare 3 : 4 
with 4: 1 and 3: 5 with 4: 8) that it may safely be assumed to 
bear the same date and to refer specially to David's experience in 

connection with the rebellion of Absalom. He cries to his God 

for help (v. 1); expostulates with his enemies (v. 2); and exhorts 
them to consideration, repentance and righteousness (v. 3-5); 
contrasts his own joyful and peaceful repose in God with their 
persistent but fruitless endeavors after perishing good (vs. 6-8). 

The "chief musician" to whom this Psalm is intrusted may 
have been a choir-leader or the leading singer, i. e., the precen- 
tor; or perhaps the solo performer accompanying the instruments. 
The circumstance that fifty-three Psalms are committed to him — 
so many and no more — seems to favor the theory that his service 
was special and not universal, i. e., he did not bear this part in all 
the songs of the temple. But it is very difficult if not even im- 
possible to arrive at certainty in regard to the precise forms of 

Hebrew music in the temple worship. "Neginoth" specified 

the musical instrument to be used. 

1. Hear me when I call, O God of my righteousness : 
thou hast enlarged me when I was in distress ; have mercy 
upon me, and hear my prayer. 

"0 God of my righteousness" is equivalent to, O my righteous 
God. The suppliant is conscious of his own integrity in the 
great question at issue between himself and his enemies ; in this 
assurance of his heart he practically says: "I know God. will 
vindicate my cause as his own, since really it is his own," and 
therefore I can appeal to him as my ever-righteous God — my De- 
fender and Avenger. Thou hast on former occasions brought 

me forth from straitness into a large place; therefore I will trust 
thee yet and for evermore; have mercy upon me now and hear 

my prayer. The Hebrew words, "in distress;" "hast enlarged 

me;'' conceive of one cramped, straitened, shut in so closely as to 
make escape apparently impossible, yet with God's help brought 



PSALM IV. 



21 



forth with ample range for flight and escape. Arab life, and in- 
deed oriental life generally, associates peril with straitness, but 
safety with free scope for flight. To this day the Arab relies for 
his protection, not on city Avails or fortified castles ; but on his 
vast deserts and his fleet horse or dromedary. "Straitened," he is 
an easy prey : "in a large place," he defies his foe. David had 
practical experience of this when hunted down by King Saul. 

2. O ye sons of men, how long ivill ye turn my glory into 
shame ? hoiu long will ye love vanity, and seek after leasing ? 
Selah. 

The original is' very abrupt: "Sons of men, how long . . . 
my glory to shame ? Will ye love vanity . . . will ye seek 
lies ? The ellipses are well supplied in the English version — How 
long will ye account my glory as only my disgrace ? How can ye 
think that my God who is my real glory is only my reproach ? Or 
that my faith in him which is the noblest element in my character 
and life, is really my disgrace ? How long will your heart love 
this vain attempt at rebellion and seek to pervert all truth and 
right into falsehood and wrong? For, treason is falsehood; re- 
bellion is perjury — the most intense form of lying. "Leasing" is 

an obsolete English word for lying. The men here addressed — 

"Sons of men" — were chief men, princes, perhaps the head men 
of the tribes, who seem generally to have gone into this conspiracy 
with Absalom. The Hebrew has various words for man; one in- 
dicating man as of the earth, frail and weak; another, maa as 
strong, gigantic ; and again another, man as of noble rank. The 

latter is used here. Selah, meaning pause, invites to reflection 

upon the thought just presented, and here, very pertinently. Why 
should ye, men of noble rank, be so unmanly as to account my 
real glory to be only my disgrace ? How can ye so pervert the 
reality of things ? How can noble men either think or do a thing 
so mean ? 

3. But know that the Lord hath set apart him that is 
godly for himself : the Lord will hear when I call unto him. 

But know ye that God hath no sympathy with your notions of 
what is one's glory or disgrace. You think it my disgrace that I 
have sought the Lord Jehovah and trusted him for help in all my 
straits. Know ye that Jehovah has always distinguished with pe- 
culiar honor the truly pious man — the law of his realm being: 
"Them that honor me I will honor" (1 Sam. 2: 30). Therefore 
I know that the Lord will hear when I call upon him. 

4. Stand in awe, and sin not : commune with your own 
heart upon your bed, and be still. Selah. 

It would be quite within the usual significance of the first verb* 



2 



22 



PSALM IV. 



here to render it — "rage, but sin not;" i. e., do not sin in thus 
raging against the Lord's anointed. Paul quotes it from the Sep- 
tuagint in this sense (Eph. 4: 26): "Be ye angry and sin not" — 
i, e.. sin not by the indulgence of anger ; never let the sun go down 

a witness to your wrath. But it is also in harmony with the 

primary sense of this verb to translate with our English version : 
" Stand in awe ; " let your soul be impressed with a wholesome 
fear of the great God ! The verb always implies agitation, great 
excitement ; but as to the character of this excitement, it takes a 
somewhat wide range, so as to embrace fear as well as anger. 
Fear is the better sense here. It relieves the passage of the harsh- 
ness and apparent incongruity of enjoining anger. " Talk to 

your own heart; " listen to the inward voice of conscience; hush 
the din of the outward world and think of God ; think of your 

great guilt before him. Thus the Tsalmist exhorts his guilty 

persecutors to consider their ways, repent, and escape the judg- 
ments of the Almighty. Selah, a pause for reflection, is specially 

pertinent here. 

5. Offer the sacrifices of righteousness, and put your 
trust in the Lord. 

Sacrifice to God only in righteousness, not in hypocrisy, not in 
the midst of your schemes of wickedness. So and only so can you 
fitly put your trust in the Lord. It avails nothing that you profess 
or even assay to trust him while your hearts are in sin and your 
offerings are in all unrighteousness. 

6. There be many that say, Who will show us any good ? 
Loud, lift thou up the light of thy countenance upon us. 

Many are saying here and now in this grand conspiracy — "Who 
will show us good ? " Who will give us the new happiness we seek 
under our new king? So they: but David's heart seeks good in 
God alone : " Lord, lift thou the light of thy countenance upon 
us : " — that brings the joy of heaven to our souls. In the phrase 
"Lift up the light of thy countenance," there may be a double 
figure — that of lifting up the face upon one as opposed to turning 
it away in displeasure ; and that of causing light to beam on one 
in darkness. The prescribed formula for the blessing from the 
priest (Num. 6 : 24-26) has this twofold expression : " The Lord 
make his face shine upon* thee ; " " The Lord lift up his countenance 
upon thee." Full of beauty and force is this thought of God lift- 
ing the sunlight of his face upon a soul, otherwise in the gloom of 
darkness. David means to say that other men, e. g., those treach- 
erous enemies of his, may seek their good elsewhere and any- 
where else they please; but for himself it is an all-sufficient joy if 
only he may have peace in God and the sunlight of his favor. 

7. Thou hast put gladness in my heart, more than in the 
time that their corn and their wine increased. 



PSALM V. 



23 



Thou, God, hast put more gladness in my heart than they have 
when their harvests are most abundant and their souls are most 
merry in feasting and wine. 

8. I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, 
Lord, only makest me dwell in safety. 

Nothing could better express the sweet and perfect repose of 
faith than this. No matter for the danger to my throne or the 
peril to my life ; my soul shall still rest in God, my Refuge — rest 
so completely that I shall lay me down and sleep in peace, for with 
God for my Helper, and all the universe besides against me, I shall 
dwell in safety. God alone, God with no other refuge or friend, is 

simply sufficient to ensure my salvation. And this experience 

is for me, let each reader say, as truly as for David. It stands 
here of set divine purpose for the people of God in every age to 
read and to sing; to meditate upon and to transfer to their oven case 
and appropriate each to his own soul in the midst of whatever 
trials, persecutions, dangers. The heart that is consciously upright 
before God, honestly and humbly seeking his favor above all things 
else, may trust in his protection and in his love forever. Such 
walking by faith is morally sublime. It has a grand power to lift 
up and ennoble human character. 

OO^OC 

PSALM V. 

This Psalm, like the two that precede it, is pertinent to the cir- 
cumstances of David when driven from his home and throne by 
Absalom in revolt. It is supposed, with some probability, that this 
entire series of five Psalms, beginning with the third, pertain to 
that revolt and to, the varied experiences of David amid those 
scenes. The fact that the third locates itself there, and that the 
seventh was occasioned by the words of Cush, the Benjamite (who 
may be same with Shimei) favors this opinion, especially when 
coupled with the fact that in many cases a subsequent Psalm, with- 
out the usual introductory notices of author and occasion, is a con- 
tinuation of a preceding one in which these points are given. 

Sundry features of this Pslam, to be noticed as they occur, favor 

its reference to the times of Absalom. The words "upon 

Nehiloth" are obscure. The choice of construction seems to lie 
between that of Gesenius, "upon flutes," wind instruments, per- 
forated, as he takes the Hebrew root to mean; and that of the 
ancient versions adopted by Alexander and others who derive it 
from another root which means to inherit, with the sense, concern- 
ing inheritances or destinies, i. e. concerning the diverse lot of the 
righteous and the wicked. The latter is best supported. 

1. Give ear to my words, O Lokd; consider my medita- 
tion. 



24 



PSALM V. 



This prayer invokes the attention of God, first to his words,, and 
next to his thoughts — the deep musings and workings of his mind. 
In his view God. looks specially on the heart. Prayer to God 
should always recognize this precious truth — that God thinks of 
and cares for the deep sorrows of our soul and their out-going ex- 
pressions of imploring supplication. 

2. Hearken unto the voice of my cry, my King, and my 
God : for unto thee will I pray. 

"My cry," the word being commonly used for an outcry of dis- 
tress. Pertinently, David, himself a king under God, addresses 
Jehovah as his own King and his own God, making this recognized 
relation a ground of his plea. Since I take thelnfinite God as 

my God and my King, he will hear my cry. Hear me for I 

pray unto thee. I look nowhere else for aid, but I do cast myself 
upon thee in praj-er and trust. His faith clings to the divine arm, 
reasoning thus : He who hath so promised and who hath so in- 
vited his creatures to trust in their God alone, can not fail to hear 
their cry in their time of need. 

3. My voice shalt thou hear in the morning, O Lord ; 
in the morning will I direct my 'prayer unto thee, and will 
look up. 

The Hebrews sometimes speak of doing things " in the morn- 
ing," meaning by it rather earnestly than early. Perhaps both 
ideas are involved here — the latter more surely. The first thing 
when the day opens and my refreshed powers turn anew to my 
life-work, I will lift up my voice gratefully to God my preserver, 

imploringly to God my benefactor. What can be more fitting? 

Why not begin each day in communion with God? In the 

original word, "direct," lies a tacit allusion to the sacrificial system 
in which this is the technical word for arrange in order, the wood 
upon the altar, the flesh upon the wood, also the shew-bread upon 
the table. David's thought therefore is this: As the priests 
arrange all sacred things and oblations in due order before the 
Lord, so will I as each day opens adjust myself — my thoughts, my 

thanksgivings, and my supplications before God. " I will look 

up," i. e., to see blessings return upon me in answer to my prayer. 
I take a waiting, expectant attitude toward God. This word 
naturally implies and expresses expectation of coming good. 

4. For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wicked- 
ness : neither shall evil dwell with thee. 

The Psalmist means not only that God has no complacency in 
wrong, but that he is utterly displeased with it. Evil, in the per- 
son of evil-doers, shall not dwell with God — shall not come near to 
him to be at home in his presence and to experience his favor. 
In this conviction, David is sure God will never be on the side 



PSALM V. 



25 



of his persecutors— will not befriend them in their schemes to 
dethrone himself. 

5. The foolish shall not stand in thy sight : thou hatest 
all workers of iniquity. 

The "foolish" — rather the proud who love to display themselves 
and to shine before others' eyes. However lofty their pride, how- 
ever exquisite their beauty, or gorgeous their display, they can not 
stand before the pure eye of God. Thou hast abhorred all evil- 
doers, and wilt forever. The history of God's past abhorrence of 
sinners confirms his conviction that God will utterly abhor them 
in all the future. 

6. Thou shalt destroy them that speak leasing: the Lord 
will abhor tlie bloody and deceitful man. 

Passing from general statements of sin to specific, he names 
lying, deceitful, and blood-thirsty men, such being now specially 
combined to expel him from his throne and country. This trea- 
son of Absalom resorted to falsehood and slander against the 
king; involved treachery and perjury, and of course contemplated 
nothing short of blood as the price of success. Such evil-doers 
God must abhor, and therefore must destroy. 

7. But as for me, I will come into thy house in the mul- 
titude of thy mercy : and in thy fear will I worship toward 
thy holy temple. 

"As for me," my lot is in contrast with theirs. "In the mul- 
titude of thy mercies" (not on the score of my special merits), 
I will come into thy house, the temple, with my joyful thanks- 
givings. The original puts the "mercy" in the foreground. "In 

thy great mercy I shall be permitted to come," etc. "Worship 

toward thy temple," since the Hebrew worshipers might not enter 
into- the most holy place, but stood without, offering their reverent 

worship toward that august but vailed presence. This allusion 

to his assured return to Jerusalem applies pertinently to his tran- 
sient exile when driven out by Absalom's uprising. The reader 
will recall with interest David's plaintive words as they appear in 
the history (2 Sam. 15 : 25, 26). " If I shall find favor in the eyes 
of the Lord, he will bring me again and show me both it and his 
habitation : But if he thus say, I have no delight in thee, behold 
here am I; let him do unto me as it seeemeth good to him." At 
a later hour, in writing this Psalm, the uncertainty of this "if" 
had given place to an assured expectation. 

8. Lead me, O Lord, in thy righteousness because of 
mine enemies ; make thy way straight before my face. 

Lead me forth out of my present straits; guide all my steps in 
thy perfect wisdom. Do this also "in thy righteousness" i. e., in 
thy justice; blast the purposes of my wicked enemies, and so de- 
liver me. 



26 



PSALM V. 



9. For there is no faithfulness in their mouth ; their in- 
ward part is very wickedness ; their throat is an open sepul- 
cher ; they flatter with their tongue. 

There is nothing firm, reliable in their mouth. Not only out- 
wardly but inwardly they are utter wickedness — false to the very 
core of their heart. Their throat is like a grave standing ever 
open, yawning to devour — the grave being thought of here "(as in 
Prov. 30: 15, 16) as one of the things that never says, "It is 
enough." As a figure, the grave may be either an insatiate de- 
stroyer or a receptacle of all things loathsome. The former use is 

to be preferred here. The last clause reads literally, "They 

make their tongues smooth," i. e., for flattery and by its practice. 

This verse is quoted pertinently by Paul to the Romans (3 : 

13, 14) in proof of the intense depravity of human hearts. 

10. Destroy thou them, O God ; let them fall by their 
own counsels; cast them out in the multitude of their 
transgressions ; for they have rebelled against thee. 

Such intense wickedness precedes and foreshadows destruction, 
and draws it down upon their own heads. Hold them guilty, 
O God ; let them fall because of their malicious counsels ; or, per- 
haps, let them fail of executing their schemes, and so let them 
bring ruin on themselves ; cast them forth from thy presence and 
favor in (and because of) the multitude of their sins, for they 
are in rebellion, not more against me, their legitimate sovereign, 

than against thee, their infinite Lord and King. This is not 

malicious imprecation ; it is not David moved selfishly to curse his 
enemies, considered as only his own, but it is David, the rightful 
sovereign of the nation, conscious of acting under the great God 
both of Israel and of all the nations of the earth, jealous for the 
honor of his Master, accounting the wickedness of those traitors 
more as rebellion against God than as treason against his own 
earthly throne; identifying himself with God, and invoking his 
interposition for the honor of his name and the vindication of his 

justice. And now can any complaint lie against the spirit of 

these words ? Ought not the all-perfect God to hold such sinners 
guilty and treat them accordingly ? And ought not every soul 
that loves God, and justice, and the well-being of the universe to 
stand with God in this? approving his judgments upon the wicked, 
sympathizing with his abhorrence of all sin and wrong, and rejoic- 
ing that he will not let the incorrigibly wicked escape their de- 
served doom? 

11. But let all those that put their trust in thee rejoice : 
let them ever shout for joy, because thou defendest them : 
let them also that love thy name be joyful in thee. 

Naturally and inevitably the joy of the righteous stands over 
against the woe of the wicked. The judgments that bring down 



PSALM V. 



27 



upon the wicked their just doom bring deliverance and salvation 
to the righteous. David is saved because Absalom and his fellow- 
traitors fall. God's interposing arm brings both results. When 
traitors against God and man meet their doom, all men loyal to 
God and his cause may fitly rejoice. Joy that God reigns is 
always legitimate — always glorious. It is sad that men and 
devils will be wicked; it is not sad that, being wicked past all 
cure and even all effective restraint in a free world, they should 
eat of the fruit of their own doings, and that God makes their 
example of woe and ruin a glorious power toward holiness and 

blessedness in his universe. Thus much in exposition of what 

are so often called the imprecatory and vindictive Psalms, it is fit 
should be said, and is of the utmost consequence that all men 
should understand. Let us beware lest in taking part with the 

wicked we be found fighting against God. The same subject is 

discussed more at length in Ps. 109. 

12. For thou, Lord, wilt bless the righteous ; with favor 
wilt thou compass him as with a shield. 

"For" involves the argument that by virtue of his very nature 
and promises God must, and therefore will, bless the righteous. 
Let the righteous rejoice, for God will certainly bless them. In 

this there can be no failure. Thou wilt cover him all round 

about with thy manifested favor, as the ancient shield covered and 
protected the warrior's person. 

As said above, there is good ground for assuming a primary ref- 
erence in this Psalm to the rebellion of Absalom and his party. 
It would seem, however, to have been written, not as a first thought, 
but rather as an after-thought, upon those scenes. In reference 
especially to his feelings toward those conspirators and their guilty 
chief, the reader will note that David's first thought as to Absalom 
was quite unlike what stands forth so distinctly in this Psalm. 
His first emotions were those of an agonized father, appalled, it 
may be, with the horrid crime of his son, but agonized with his 
awful death, in his sins, under the wrath of the Almighty! With 
only the human side toward him, he wailed aloud : " 0 Absalom ! 
my son, my son ; would God I had died for thee, O Absalom ! my 
son, my son!" (2 Sam. 19: 4.) But, remarkably, in all the 
Psalms that were subsequently penned to record the impressions 
and to expand the moral lessons of that entire scene, not one 
trace appears of these merely human sympathies with the beauti- 
ful but hardened and guilty Absalom. It would seem that 
David's after-thought gave God the ascendency and merged those 
outbursts of parental emotion in the purer stream of his divine 
sympathies. He came to think more of God and less of even a 
son. Nothing that would savor of apologizing for Absalom or of 
reflection upon the providences that caused his death could possi- 
bly find place in the inspired liturgies of the church. 



28 



PSALM VI. 



PSALM VI. 

This plaintive Psalm is ascribed to David, but its date and oc- 
casion are not entirely certain. It was obviously composed in 
some season of severe affliction, this affliction being not (as some 
have too hastily concluded) sickness, but the hostility of enemies. 
' He does indeed speak of his bones as "vexed" (v. 2), but of his 
"soul" as yet more so (v. 3); and in the sequel alludes so de- 
cidedly to his personal enemies (vs. 7, 8, 10) as to leave no doubt 
that this trial was primarily from persecutors rather than from 
disease. Not unnaturally, his body sympathizes with his mental 
sufferings. Enemies outside of himself are certainly here; and 
this cause being sufficient to account for all the points made here, 

we need not look for any other. Under the inquiry, What 

enemy was this? the choice lies between Saul and Absalom, with 
some preponderance in favor of the latter, especially because, 
under this great trial, he might very naturally feel that the Lord 
was rebuking and chastising him "in hot displeasure," because 
of his great sins in the matter of Bathsheba. The words of vs. 8 
and 10 are also quite appropriate to these enemies. It is, how- 
ever, a case in which we lack the data for an absolutely certain 
conclusion. 

In the caption, "Neginoth," which appears in the caption of 
seven Psalms and also in Habakkuk 3, is supposed to name a 
stringed instrument, played by striking the strings, as the Hebrew 

word indicates. "Sheminith," signifying an eighth or octave, is 

thought to mean an octave bcloio, i. e., on the bass ke}" — probably 
as more appropriate to this sad theme. 

1. O Lord, rebuke me not in thine anger, neither 
chasten me in thy hot displeasure. 

2. Have mercy upon me, O Lord ; for I am weak : O 
Lord, heal me ; for my bones are vexed. 

3. My soul is also sore vexed : but thou, O Lord, how 
long? 

This is imploring supplication under a sense of guilt and ill de- 
sert. If we assume the scene to be his flight before Absalom, we 
very readily account for this pungent conviction of guilt and this 
sense of the divine displeasure. It need not surprise us that God 
should call to his mind those greatest sins of his public life 
adultery and murder, both committed under circumstances of ex- 
treme aggravation. We must suppose David to have seen and 
felt very deeply that God still had a controversy with him for 
those awful sins, and could not send him the deliverance he 
sought till his heart was broken again in most sincere repentance, 
and he should publicly cast himself upon divine mercy. Then 
God might, honorably to himself and safely as to David, forgive 
his sins and send him help from on high. " My bones are 



PSALM VI. 



2'J 



vexed," is, more precisely, are shaken, tremble under the weight of 

an old man's bitter grief and heart-trials. "But thou, O Lord, 

how long" ere thou give me some token of thy forgiving mercy 
and send me the help I need ? 

4. Keturn, O Lord, deliver my soul : oh save me for 
thy mercies' sake. 

"Keturn" suggests that God's displeasure is expressed by dis- 
tance — by withdrawing the light and joy of his presence. He 
rests his plea, not on his good deeds, not even on his repentance, 
but solely on God's mercy: "/or thy names sake save me." Ho 
all true penitents feel. No words can put too strongly their sense 
of emptiness as to all merit of 'their own. 

5. For in death there is no remembrance of thee: in the 
grave who shall give thee thanks ? 

" In death " means, not in the momentary point of dying, but 
in the state of the dead — equivalent to "in the grave " in the par- 
allel clause. So, also, " remembrance of thee " corresponds in 
thought to " give thee thanks," and aids us to the precise signifi- 
cance of the verse. This does not deny all thought and conscious- 
ness, much less all existence in the state after death, but simply 
denies that the dead can render thanks to God here in his holy 
temple before the eyes of living men, as his soul longed to do. 
His prayer would be, Let me live ; let me find mercy of thee, so that I 
may go again before the great congregation in thy house of praise 
and there render my thanksgivings for delivering mercy. Death 

would cut me off from this greatest joy of my heart. The same 

sentiment anpears again in Ps. 30: 9, and 88: 10-12, and .115: 
17,18; alsolsa. 38: 18. 

6. I am weary with my groaning ; all the night make I 
my bed to swim ; I water my conch with my tears. 

7. Mine eye is consumed because of grief ; it waxeth old 
because of all mine enemies. 

Groans and tears are the witness of his bitter grief. So many 
sharp sorrows at once — his throne in peril ; his son a rebel and 
the immediate cause of this avalanche of trouble ; but. more than 
all, a sense that his own God was chastening him in his hot dis- 
pleasure—how could any heart, accustomed to repose in God's 
love, pass through such complicated, multiplied, torturing pains 
without tears ? 

8. Depart from me, all ye workers of iniquity ; for the 
Lord hath heard the voice of my weeping. 

9. The Lord hath heard my supplication ; the Lord 
will receive my prayer. 

All suddenly his waiting soul receives the witness from God of 



80 



PSALM VII. 



his forgiving mercy, and instantly his tone changes ; despondency 
gives place to exultant hope and even confidence in God. ''De- 
part from me," says he, " all ye workers of iniquity; " what more 
have I to do with you ? Is not my God almighty to save ? He 
has heard the voice of my weeping; it is enough! And he turns 
the sweet thought over and over: ''The Lord hath heard the voice 
of my weeping ; " "the Lord hath heard my supplication;" the 
Lord not only hath in the nearer present, but will in the future 
receive my prayer. All will be well ! 

10. Let all mine enemies be ashamed and sore vexed : let 
them return and be ashamed suddenly. 

In this connection these words are more prediction than impre- 
cation. He felt sure of this result, and could expect nothing less. 

"Let them return," i. e., from this persecuting pursuit of me; 

let them retire, baffled, defeated, broken ; " let them be ashamed " 
—in the usual sense of confounded, put to shame, as men utterly 
unable to accomplish their purpose. 

PSALM VII. 

The caption to this Psalm fails to solve with certainty the ques- 
tion of its particular occasion, because we are unable to identify 
this " Cush, the Benjamite." The history gives no allusion to him 
under this name. Some suppose that he is Shiruei, who came out 
from Bahurim and met David in his flight before Absalom (2 Sam. 
16 : 5-13) and cursed him grievously. Others suppose that he is 
King Saul himself, this name Cush, equivalent to the Ethiopian, 
being given to Saul to signify his. bad character. There are 
slight traces {e. g., in Amos 9 : 7) that the Ethiopians were in 
bad repute, and hence the name might be given to Saul for this 
reason. In favor of the reference to Shimei are the prominence 
given to certain spoken words; and the fact that this caption 
seems to assume that the case was well known, coupled also 
with the circumstance that the preceding Psalms — the third and 
fourth certainly, the fifth with very great probability, and the 
sixth with a fair degree of probability — refer to the conspiracy 
of Absalom and to David's sore affliction from that cause. If 
this seventh Psalm refers to this same event, we have an obvious 
reason for the grouping of these Psalms together and for the ab- 
sence of any more definite account in their respective captions of 

their circumstances and occasion. In favor of the reference to 

Saul is mainly the one consideration that the points made seem 
to fit his case and his relations to David better than they fit the 

case of Absalom. The considerations are, in my view, too 

evenly balanced to justify a very positive decision between 
them. Fortunately, no very important result turns upon the de- 



PSALM VII. 



31 



cision. The moral of the Psalm is essentially the same, which- 
ever may have been its special occasion. "Shiggaion" is prob- 
ably a Psalm of wandering, written during David's flight and wan- 
dering from his home and city, either before Saul or before Absa- 
lom. The previous Psalm confesses great sin as toward God; 

this asserts integrity and uprightness as toward man, his enemy 
and persecutor, yet with no necessary antagonism or even diversity 
in the moral state of the writer, save that there he contemplates 
his relations toward God, here his relations toward man. 

1. O Lord my God, in thee do I put my trust: save 
me from all them that persecute me, and deliver me : 

2. Lest he tear my soul like a lion, rending it in pieces, 
while there is none to deliver. 

David rests his appeal to God for help on two grounds : (1.) 
that he is in peril and can not live without help : (2.) that he has 
made the Lord God his refuge ; that he had long before accepted 
Jehovah as his Friend and Helper, and therefore comes to him 

now in his time of need. That he should speak of his enemies 

at one time as many and at other times as one, need occasion no 
difficulty, since the one may be a chief — the leader of the rest. 
This would apply either to Saul or to Absalom, each of these 
being the moving spirit, but having others acting under them in 
their efforts against David's life. 

3. O Lord my God, if I have done this; if there be 
iniquity in my hands ; 

4. If I have rewarded evil unto him that was at peace 
with me ; (yea, I have delivered him that without cause is 
mine enemy;) 

5. Let the enemy persecute my soul, and take it; yea, 
let him tread down my life upon the earth, and lay mine 
honor in the dust. Selah. 

If I have done aught against my enemy worthy of death, as he 
seems to claim, I refuse not to die. If I have forfeited my life by 
crime against my enemy, let him take it ! — — The last clause of 
v. 4, put in parenthesis in our English version, has been trans- 
lated and constructed variously, the verb rendered " have deliv- 
ered " being translated by Gesenius and Alexander, stripped or 
spoiled ; by Fuerst, pressed sorely upon, afflicted ; and by Maurer, 
have enraged. All concur in discarding the parenthesis and in 
putting if instead of "yea," continuing the same construction as 
in the three preceding verbs — " If I have done this ; 1 if I have 
rewarded evil; if I have spoiled," or as the sense may be, op- 
pressed or enraged. Moreover all agree that the Hebrew words 
for " without cause 1 apply not to the enemy but to his own act, 
thus : If I have without good cause oppressed or spoiled ; not, if 
I have oppressed one who had no cause to be my enemy.- The 



PSALM VII. 



Hebrew gives no authority for changing the construction from if 
to " yea." The more exact translation would he, " If I have requited 
evil for good to one who was my friend, if I have even spoiled him 
as an enemy without provocation, then let my enemy pursue i&y 
soul and overtake and tread down my life to the ground," etc. 

6. Arise, O Lord, in thine anger, lift up thyself because 
of the rage of mine enemies : and awake for me to the 
judgment that thou hast commanded. 

"Arise and awake," addressed to God, are strong words, indi- 
cating that he had been sitting and even sleeping while his friend 
had been in sore peril from enraged enemies. It seemed to David 

that his imminent danger had been unnoticed by his God. 

"Lift up thyself in this rage of mine enemies" — in the midst of 
it, while they are breathing out threatening and slaughter against 

me. "Because of" is rather implied than expressed. While 

my enemies are excited to fury to do me a great injustice, do thou 
stir up thyself in earnest to do me justice. The word "anger" 
seems «to be spoken of God to correspond antithetically with 
"rage," said of his enemies; but the real antithesis of thought is 
as given above — they, mad upon doing me injustice ; thou, there- 
fore, in solemn earnest to do me justice. Whenever the word 
"anger" is used of God it ought certainly to be qualified by his 
well known character, and therefore every element of unreasonable 
passion or irritation, or of selfish excitement, must be perfectly 
excluded. The character, the heart, of God being what it is, 
anger in him can not possibly be any thing more or else than 
a just and righteous displeasure against wrong-doing and an 
honorable and benevolent zeal to sustain the right and put down 
the wrong. "Awake for me to the judgment thou hast com- 
manded," might be put thus: Awake in my behalf to decide my 
case by a righteous decision according to that providential govern- 
ment over men which thou hast instituted. The words recognize 
the fact of God's righteous government over men as a positive 
institution, to which in this emergency he makes his confident 
appeal. 

7. So shall the congregation of the people compass thee 
about : for their sakes therefore return thou on high. 

The nations shall gather about Thee as their great Judge; there- 
fore return thou to thy lofty throne above this assembled people. 
The thought is of a grand court of the nations with the Great 
God as their judge. 

8. The Lord shall judge the people: judge me, O Lord, 
according to my righteousness, and according to mine in- 
tegrity that is in me. 

9. Oh let the wickedness of the wicked come to an end ; 



PSALM VII. 



33 



but establish the just: for the righteous God trieth the 
hearts and reins. 

10. My defense is of God, which saveth the upright in 
heart. 

The same idea is more fully expanded. Additional points are 
made — that God rules to put an end to wickedness and to establish 
righteousness; and rules with perfect equity because "he tries 
hearts and reins" — i. e., judges, not according to outside appear- 
ances, but according to inward reality, the intents of the heart. 

11. God judgeth the righteous, and God is angry with the 
ivicked every day. 

12. If he turn not, he will whet his sword; he hath bent 
his bow r , and made it ready. 

In v. 11, the words "with the wicked" are not expressed in the 
original — omitted, we must presume, because in the writer's mind 
too obvious to need mention. God's judgment upon the case of 
the righteous is thought of here as a vindication of his cause 
against the oppression of the wicked. So considered, David says, 
"God will avenge the righteous man, intensely indignant all the 
time" i. e., against his oppressor. So the next words imply, 
"If he turn not" — which can possibly mean none other than this 
wicked persecutor of the good. This turning must be a reversal 

of his course — real repentance of this sin. " Hath bent [Heb. 

trodden"] his bow," i. e., with the foot as was the practice in spring- 
ing the powerful bow of the ancient warrior. 

13. He hath also prepared for him the instruments of 
death ; he ordaineth his arrows against the persecutors. 

The best critics concur in reading the last clause, not " against 
the persecutors," but he prepares burning arrows. The HebreAV 
words seem to demand this. Arrows on fire were hurled to burn 
down cities and do otherwise a terrible execution. 

14. Behold, he travaileth with iniquity, and hath con- 
ceived mischief, and brought forth falsehood. 

15. He made a pit, and digged it, and is fallen into the 
ditch ivJiich he made. 

16. His mischief shall return upon his own head, and his 
violent dealing shall come down upon his' own pate. 

The figure sets forth that this wicked man studiously plots mis- 
chief, involving slander and lies ; digs a pit for the good man but 
falls into it himself, his schemes reacting against himself under 
the righteous ordering of divine retribution. 

17. I will praise the Lord according to his righteous- 
ness : and will sing praise to the name of the Lord most 
high. 



34 



PSALM VIII. 



In view of such results of God's righteous ways in providence, 
David exults in the Lord and sings praises to his glorious name. 
Well he may ! So let all those who love his name and trust his 
righteous administration unite their hearts and songs in grateful 
praises. 

PSALM VIII. 

A recent critic advances the opinion that the idea of this Psalm 
was suggested to David by his victory over Goliath, thinking of 
himself as a mere child, and of his powerful antagonist as " the 
enemy and avenger," whose proud boasts he brought by God's 
power to eternal silence. This allusion to " the enemy and aven- 
ger " is the only point in the Psalm which favors this opinion. 
Every thing else concurs to sustain the more common view, viz., 
that the Psalm had no particular historical occasion, but stands as 
a sublime ode in praise of God's glory as revealed in all his works, 
including man, the chief of them all. Its key-note appears in the 
first strain which leads the thought of the ode, and in the last 
which comes in as the comprehensive inference from the whole ; 
" 0 Lord, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth ! " 
How grand and glorious are thy manifestations in this world of 

thine ! 1 see no demand for any other occasion for this writing 

than the opening of one's eyes and heart to the impressions which 
a view of the heavens, the earth and man, would legitimately make. 
For such surveys of the heavens David's shepherd life gave him 

ample opportunity. " Upon Gittith " probably refers either to 

the instrument or to the music with which it should be sung. It 
appears also in the titles to Ps. 81, and 84, which like this fire joy- 
ous in character. 

1. O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all 
the earth ! who hast set thy glory above the heavens. 

That this " Lord" is our Lord exceedingly heightens the precious- 
ness of these manifestations. " Thy name is equivalent to thy 
manifestations — the qualities of character which thou dost reveal 

over all the earth, in every work of thy hands." The form of the 

Hebrew verb in the phrase, " who hast set" as it stands in our 
text, is precisely the Hebrew imperative. " Set thou thy glory above 
the heavens." Some critics, however, suppose it to be defectively 
written, and really to be the indicative, and therefore to be trans- 
lated as in our English version. The current of thought strongly 
favors this view. On the other hand, an imperative here — a com- 
mand going forth from the Psalmist, to be repeated by every reader 
and singer, is simply unendurable. 

2. Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings hast thou 



PSALM VIII. 



35 



ordained strength because of thine enemies, that thou 
mightest still the enemy and the avenger. 

The words, "ordain strength out of the mouth of babes," etc., 
will impress most readers as not very clear. A careful study both 
of the original and of the nature of the case will give us some 
light. The Hebrew word for ordain* means primarily to found, 

to lay the foundation for. "Strength" is the usual meaning of 

the Hebrew word thus translated, yet in this case most critics con- 
cur in the sense — praise, glory. We get the full idea when we 
contemplate this admiration of God's works, felt in the minds of 
children and expressed by their lips, as giving strength to the claims 
and the cause of the great God — affording one of the most con- 
vincing testimonies to his infinite perfections. Their simple un- 
sophisticated hearts, as yet untainted with the false philosophies 
of older sinners, bear a glorious witness to the real grandeur, sub- 
limity, wisdom and beneficence of God's great works of creation 

and providence. It is better not to press the words, "babes and 

sucklings " too far back upon infancy. The nature of the case re- 
quires that we think of children who are sufficiently mature to 
take in the natural impression of the beauty and glory of God's 
great world. Our Lord seems to refer to this passage in that de- 
vout ejaculation (Matt. 11: 25): "I thank thee, O Father, Lord 
of heaven and earth " [this epithet manifestly referring to the 
strain of this Psalm] " because thou hast hid these things from the 
wise and prudent and hast revealed them unto babes." Yet " babes " 
here are not mere infants in days (speechless infants) but rather 
simple-hearted children as opposed to the worldly-wise, the self- 
conceited and vain. Another allusion .made by Christ to this 
passage (Matt. 21 : 16) most certainly contemplates children old 
enough to go into the streets and the temple and shout " Hosanna 
to the Son of David." As to this quotation of the verse before us, 
it need not be pressed to imply that David in this Psalm explicitly 
predicted these joyful acclamations of the children. It suffices if 
these acclamations afford a case in point — an illustration of the 
great principle contemplated in the Psalm. So much is entirely 
and beautifully true. The simple heart of childhood loves to bear 
witness to the purity and glory of Jesus as it appeared when he 
entered Jerusalem in triumph. The same simple heart loves to 
bear like witness when it sees God in his great works in this 
beautiful and glorious world — which is the doctrine of our Psalm. 
— — Such testimony serves to silence the cavils of God's enemies. 
The words quietly suggest that it is only from enemies to God — 
from those who are his enemies in their heart by reason of their 
wicked works — that any counter voice is heard, disparaging to the 
great God. No other voice ever needs to be put to silence save 
that of prejudiced enemies. 



SO 



PSALM VIII. 



3. When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, 
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained; 

4. What is man, that thou art mindful of him? and the 
son of man, that thou visitest him? 

The omission to name the glorious sun, as well as the prominence 
given to the moon and the stars, suggest that this is a night scene. 
Yet David had a soul to appreciate the glories of the sun, for no 
human pen ever spake of the sun in finer, grander strains than 
his in Psalm 19. But the nightly heavens are sublimely grand. 
Let one walk abroad of a brilliant night and open his mind to the 
full impression; let him think of those resplendent orbs of the 
heavens, their number, their vastness, their beauty ; then, if he 
can enlarge his conceptions by the aid of modern astronomy, its 
instruments of observation and its mathematical estimates of size, 
motions, and distance, how will his view of man be dwarfed almost 
to nothing in the comparison! Verily he can find no more fit 
utterance than this, "Lord, what is man," thrown into the 
scale against these sublimely glorious heavens ? The great God 
whose hand built all those worlds, and who has the care of them 
all upon his heart — how can he stoop to be mindful also of frail 
and insignificant man? How can he have the love requisite to 
"visit" him in thoughtful care and tender compassion? Yet this 
Great Father has made account most wonderfully of this little 
being, man — as the next verse proceeds to say. 

5. For thou hast made him a little lower than the angels, 
and hast crowned him with glory and honor. 

The word translated "angels" is Elohim, the usual sense of 
which is God — the Mighty One. The translators seem to have 
followed the Septuagint in giving it " angels." But the Seventy 
were governed, not by the usage and authority of the word, but 
by their ideas of the doctrinal exigencies of the passage. It is 
better to follow the authority of the word and accept the sense — a 
little below divinity, according to Gen. 1 : 27 : " So God created 
man in his own image, in the image of God created he him." 
That David had the words of Moses in his mind is made the more 
certain by his obvious allusion to man's control over all the lower 

animals as said by Moses (Gen. 1: 28). The word "for" in 

this verse fails to give the true relations of the thought. Better 
thus : " What is man that thou shouldest remember him, the son 
of man thou shouldest visit him, and even make him a little below 
the divinity, and crown him with glory and honor" — L e., make 
him king over all other living creatures? 

6. Thou madest him to have dominion over the 
w T orks of thy hands; thou has put all things under his 
feet : 

7. All sheep and oxen, yea, and the beasts of the field ; 



PSALM VIII. 



,°>7 



8. The fowl of the air, and the fish of the sea, and what- 
soever passeth through the paths of the seas. 

On Averse 6, the question might arise whether "the works of thy 
hands" contemplate inanimate matter, or refer exclusively to ani- 
mated, living creatures, as expanded into particulars below. The 
words themselves would readily admit the broadest application, 
but the context and the obvious reference to Gen. 1 : 26, 28, favor 
the restriction to man's dominion over the animal creation. Dr. 
Alexander correctly says : " The dominion thus ascribed to man as 
a part of his original prerogative is not to be confounded with the 
coercive rule which he still exercises over the inferior creation." 
That is, David with his eye on Gen. 1 : 26, 28, thinks only of the 
dignity and dominion accorded to man in his primeval innocence, 
not of the power he is able by superior skill to assert and main- 
tain over a portion of the lower animals, despite of his fallen 
moral state. Hence we have no occasion to debate the question 
whether in his present state man has or has not this supreme 

dominion over the animal creation. Notice should be taken of 

the argument in Heb. 2 : 5-9, where this Psalm is cited as guar- 
antying to man, as a race, supreme dominion — "all things put 
under his feet;" and the argument is made that this has no com- 
plete fulfillment otherwise than in and through Christ, and therefore 
has its proper fulfillment in him alone. In other words, this su- 
preme dominion, pledged to man in innocence, was lost in his fall 
and regained only through Christ and in his person. Under this 
construction of the Psalm we have a far more grand idea in the 
central question — "What is man that thou art mindful of him, 
that thou shouldest visit him?" — thus: When I contemplate the 
glorious heavens as they spread out their majesty before me in the 
night season, I say, what is frail, weak man that thou shouldest be 
so lovingly mindful of him and shouldest visit him in the person 
of thine only Son, and shouldest make him only less than God, 
lifting him into Avonderful alliance with the Highest through the 
incarnation of thy Son in human flesh, and then shouldest crown 
him with glory and supreme dominion by making Jesus, the great 
divine Man, absolutely Lord of all ? This seems to be the argu- 
ment in Heb. 2: 5-9, and beyond question intensifies the force and 
sublimity of this Psalm. What would be grand with no under- 
lying thought of Jesus as being in the race by his human birth 
becomes surpassingly majestic when we include this great mystery 
of godliness and find the supreme dominion of man over God's 
creation consummated in the Son of Mary — the loving conde- 
scension of the Great Father made ineffably glorious in the lift- 
ing up of our race morally into the divine image. 

9. O Lord our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all 
the earth ! 

The points made in detail between the first verse and the last serve 
to put new beauty and force into these words, and we gladly re- 



38 



PSALM IX. 



peat theru in the closing strain, for more fit words no human mind 
has conceived or pen recorded. And if we may include in the 
scope of this Psalm, not the material world only but the moral 
also — not only man as a race with no Christ in it, but the race 
with an incarnate Savior as part and even the chief part of it, how 
will the manifestations of God in all the earth — in all its moral 
history, in all the destiny of its once living men, saints and sin- 
ners, become the admiration, the wonder, the praise of the intel- 
ligent universe forever ! 

PSALM IX. 

Various opinions have been held respecting the particular cir- 
cumstances under which this Psalm was written. It has been put 
forward as far as the time of Hezekiah, but without necessity and 
in causeless disregard of the authority of the title, which ascribes it 
to David. If we suppose it was written by David after some consid- 
erable victories had been gained over the national enemies of 
Israel — e. g., the Amalekites, the Philistines — while other enemies 
still remained in formidable power, we shall have present all the 

circumstances which the allusions in this song demand. The 

strain of this Psalm is exulting praise to God for victories already 
achieved; the repeated and joyful recognition of these victories 
as the result of God's righteous judgments from his lofty throne 
as King of nations, coupled with the assurance that God will still 
defend his people and vindicate their cause against their wicked 
foes. 

As to the significance of the words in the caption, "Upon Muth- 
labben," the choice lies between these constructions: (1) That 
of Alexander, who takes them to be the first words of some well- 
known song, which are given here to indicate the tune in which 
this Psalm is to be sung, as we might say, To be sung in "Rock 
of Ages" or "Majestic sweetness," meaning the well-known tune 
associated with these words; or (2) that of Gesenius, "with fe- 
male voices;" or (3) that of Fuerst, "as the name of a musical 
choir." The darkness that rests upon this and similar phrases in 
the captions of these Psalms goes to prove their high antiquity, 
running back beyond all reliable traditionary knowledge. Things 
perfectly well understood then have passed into the darkness of 
forgotten ages. It is, however, nearly if not quite certain that 
most of these terms referred to the musical execution of the 
Psalm. Since almost every thing relating to Hebrew music, its 
methods, its art, and its instruments, has perished, these musical 
terms are at best practically dead. 

1. I will praise thee, O Lokd, with my whole heart ; I 
will show forth all thy marvelous works. 



PSALM IX. 



39 



2. I will be glad and rejoice in thee : I will sing praise 
to thy name, O thou Most High. 

The Psalmist breaks into his song of praise with overflowing 
soul: "I will praise Jehovah with all my heart." The theme is 
vast and glorious; "let me proclaim all thy marvelous works." 

The Hebrew text omits "thee" in the first clause with no 

loss of terseness and force-: "I will praise Jehovah with all my 
heart." Then we have the very common change to the direct ad- 
dress— "all thy wonderful works." The sequel shows that his 
thought is chiefly upon those great victories which the God of 

Israel had given them over their national enemies. Note that 

these victories are ascribed specially to his divine arm ; hence, 
" I will be glad and rejoice in thee, thou Most High and Mighty 
One!" 

3. When mine enemies are turned back, they shall fall 
and perish at thy presence. 

4. For thou hast maintained my right and my cause ; 
thou satest in the throne judging right. 

That his enemies fall and perish in God's presence shows that 
their being turned back in defeat and flight is attributed to God's 
arm. He was there. They fell before his face. And this fall of 
theirs came of the fact that the Lord appeared in power to vindi- 
cate the cause of his anointed king, his servant David. In right- 
eousness to Abraham and his posterity, God had given them 
Canaan; in outrage against righteousness, the Amalekites came 
down upon the feeble and helpless who had fallen into the rear of 
their marching hosts (Deut. 25: 17-19); in outrage against right- 
eousness these hostile nations had often fallen upon them for pil- 
lage and slaughter. Hence it was demanded of the righteous God 
that he should reveal himself from his throne of judgment, doing 
right. 

5. Thou hast rebuked the heathen, thou hast destroyed 
the wicked, thou hast put out their name forever and ever. 

6. O thou enemy, destructions are come to a perpetual 
end : and thou hast destroyed cities ; their memorial is per- 
ished with them. 

This is a rebuke, not of words but of deeds — rebuke in the sense 
of discomfiture, overthrow, and putting to utter confusion. They are 
thought of, it should be noted, as " wicked," hostile to God, and hos- 
tile to the true interests of humanity. Hence their utter destruction. 
In the strong figure of the orignal, "thou hast wiped out their 

name forever and ever." In v. 6, the form of direct address to 

the " enemy " tends to mislead the reader, since it is not he, the 
enemy, but God, who is addressed as having destroyed their cities. 
Therefore better thus: "As to the enemy, the destructions 
brought upon him are final, total ; thou, Lord, hast . destroyed 



40 



PSALM IX. 



even their walled and powerful cities ; their very name and me- 
morial have perished, even theirs." Amalek may be taken as 

a case for illustration — perhaps was in the writer's mind. Hear 
Moses (Deut, 25 : 17-19) : "Keniember what Amalek did unto thee 
by the way, when ye were come forth out of Egypt; how he met 
thee by the way, and smote the hindmost of thee, even all that 
were feeble behind thee, when thou wast faint and weary ; and 
he feared not God. Therefore it shall be, when the Lord hath 
given thee rest in the land, that thou shalt blot out" \_ u wipe out" 
as here, v. 5] " the remembrance " [here the same Hebrew word 
is rendered "memorial"] "of Amalek from under heaven." 
This commission was specially intrusted to Saul (1 Sam. 15 : 2, 
3), and was thoroughly performed by David (1 Sam. 27 : 8, 9, and 
30: 1, 17, and 2 Sam. 8: 12). This case illustrates the animus 
of that great divine commission as it appears in this Psalm and 
in the history of the sin and doom of Amalek and other hostile 
nations of kindred spirit. Other nations are manifestly in the 
thought of the *Psalm; but the case of Amalek shows why 
God doomed them, why he bade his people destroy them, and 
why David magnifies the righteous justice of the great God in 
their destruction. 

7. But the Loud shall endure forever: he hath prepared 
his throne for judgment. 

8. And he shall judge the world in righteousness, he 
shall minister judgment to the people in uprightness. 

The Hebrew for "endure" is not limited to the idea of exist- 
ing, prolonging his days; much less to that of resisting decay 
and holding out in vigor, as the English reader might perhaps 
suppose ; but it has simply the sense of sitting as king on his 
throne, as the parallel clause has it, "He has prepared his 
throne for" [the administration of] "justice; and he shall judge 
the inhabited world — the world considered as peopled — and, 
therefore, with a moral administration over moral agents, and 
not merely a physical agency over material things. Let men 
rejoice in this moral administration, and welcome the fact that it 
shall be perpetual, eternal. 

9. The Lord also will be a refuge for the oppressed, a 
refuge in times of trouble. 

10. And they that know thy name will put their trust 
in thee : for thou, Lord, hast not forsaken them that seek 
thee. 

The connection of thought with the previous verse demands 
rather "consequently" than "also" — an inference, and not 
merely an additional fact. It is because God rules the nations 
and the people of the earth in righteousness that he will surely 
prove himself a refuge for the oppressed. Tor it is mainly to vin- 



PSALM IX. 



41 



dicate the cause of the oppressed that God rules the nations at all, 
his purpose being to restrain sin and crime and to break in pieces 
the oppressor. They who know God's name in the sense of know- 
ing these grand elements of his glorious character as a righteous 
ruler of wicked men and wicked devils will surely put their trust 
in him, for all the history of time shows that God has never forsa- 
ken those who have sought his aid against wrong-doers. 

11. Sing praises to the Lord, which, dwelleth in Zion : 
declare among the people his doings. 

On the basis of such views of God's ways in justice toward his 
people and their oppressors, vests this new summons to praise and 
to a fresh testimony to the perfect doings of the Great King and 
Lord of all. 

12. When he inaketh inquisition for blood, lie remeniber- 
eth them : he forgetteth not the cry of the humble. 

The English version does not give clearly the sense of the 
word "them" — "he remembereth them" The real antecedent is 
" blood," which in Hebrew is plural — bloods. When God searches 
for the blood-stains of murder, he remembers them — those blood- 
stains — put here for the crime and its author. The writer alludes 
to Gen. 9: 5, 6, the same leading words being here as there. 
Making "inquisition for blood" is there "requiring" the mur- 
derer's blood for the blood he has shed. By " the humble " is 

meant the defenseless, upon whom the strong come down with 
cruel, bloody hands. Their cry God accounts it at once his duty 
and his glory to hear and avenge. 

13. Have mercy upon me, O Lord ; consider my trouble 
ivhich I suffer of them that hate me, thou that liftest me up 
from the gates of death : . 

14. That I may show forth all thy praise in the gates of 
the daughter of Zion : I will rejoice in thy salvation. 

Primarily we may consider this as David's personal case, perti- 
nent however in its application to every other servant of God in 
like circumstances. Remarkably one chief reason for his plea for 
deliverance is, that he may live to render praise to God in the 
gates — the most public resort of the great city of Israel — the 
place of all others for bearing testimony to God's wonders of 
mercy before the great national congregation. 

15. The heathen are sunk down in the pit that they made : 
in the net which they hid is their own foot taken. 

As usual, God makes man's wrath react to his own praise. 
Foiling the wicked in their plans, he turns back their wicked en- 
deavors upon their own head. The figure is taken from the pits 
dug to catch wild animals. The wicked dig such pits to ensnare 



4J 



PSALM IX. 



and destroy the righteous: God brings their own feet into these 
snares. Haman and his gallows are in point. 

16. The Lord is known by the judgment which lie ex- 
ecuteth : the wicked is snared in the work of his own hands. 
Higgaion. Selah. 

Literally this would read : " Jehovah is known : he hath exe- 
cuted judgment; " but this can have no other sense than that of 
our English version : He is known because he has administered 
justice; known by those very acts of his righteous government. 
They reveal his real character. His creatures learn him from his 
doings and pre-eminently from those of his moral administration 
over intelligent beings. Of all his doings, this one is singled out 
as a rich case in point, viz. : that he causes the wicked to be 
taken in their own snares, drawn in and cast down into the pit of 
their own making. These overruling agencies of God evince his 
far-reaching eye and his all-controlling hand. He knows so well 
how to counterwork the most crafty schemes of the wicked and 
take them in their own snares and he never lacks the requisite 

agencies to bring about this result. "Higgaion" — let the voice 

fall to a low key, and let the people muse quietly, solemnly, upon 
these sublime and momentous themes. It is generally conceded 
that "Higgaion" is a term of musical direction, indicating as 
above a low, half-suppressed tone, suggestive of serious medita- 
tion. "Selah" calls for a pause for this purpose. 

17. The wicked shall be turned into hell, and all the 
nations that forget God. 

Guided by the entire context, following the course of thought 
throughout this Psalm, we must think of the "wicked" here as 
those wicked nations who appear as "mine enemies" (v. 3); as 
"the heathen" and "the wicked" (v. 5); as the "inhabited 
world" and the people thereof (v. 8); whose oppressions are 
implied (v. 9) ; whose murderous deeds are searched out and 
punished (v. 12) ; who are heathen, falling into their own 
pit (v. 15); judged before the very eyes of God (v. 19); im- 
pressed with fear and made to know that they are only frail men 
(v. 20). Consequently the punishment primarily meant hy their 
being "turned into hell" is the utter destruction which befalls 
them as nations in this world. As nations they are not known in 
the world to come. Their nationality terminates with this earthly 
life and can not reappear in the next world. But let no one jump 
from this fact to the false assumption that this and kindred 
passages have no bearing upon a future hell for all the unrepent- 
ing wicked. The simple truth is that God's government here is 
a foreshadowing of his government there. His justice here is a 
sure pledge of his justice there, for his character changes not. 
Ketribution here, carrying with it the utter ruin of his persistent 
enemies, ensures like retribution there. Ketribution here is of 



PSALM IX. 



43 



necessity imperfect, incomplete ; hence the demand for a supple- 
mentary retribution in the next world to fill out the imperfections 
of this, applying to all the individuals who experienced retribution 
in their national character and relations in this earthly life, and 
indeed to all the race. Therefore every case of retribution upon 
a guilty nation in this world is a pledge, fresh from the hand of 
God himself, that he will reward the incorrigibly wicked in the 
world to come according to their deeds. If in the great slave- 
holders' rebellion, fresh in every mind, " God prepared his throne 
for judgment; " if he heard the cry of the oppressed; if he made 
inquisition for blood; if he caused those uprising rebels to sink 
down in the pit themselves had dug, and snared them in the work 
of their own hands : then let it be forever known and never ques- 
tioned — the same God of justice will set up his 11 great white throne" 
for a future final judgment ; will bring into that judgment every 
work of man, good or evil," and make his final award in perfect 

equity "according to their works." If Napoleon with guilty 

ambition and execrable folly hurls France on Prussia in the dread- 
ful conflict of arms and finds his foot caught in his own net ; him- 
self and his dynasty and his nation sunk together into the pit 
themselves had sought to dig for a brother nation: then "God 
will be known by the judgment which he execute th," and will 
manifest his justice and his terrible but righteous retribution in 
the next world as well as this, making the retribution which 
passes so manifestly before our eyes here the pledge, and so far as 
the nature of the case admits, the illustration of that far more 
appalling, more searching, more eventful — that perfect, that eternal 
retribution which constitutes the one great fact of the world to 

come! "All the nations that forget God" — forget God and 

therefore live as if there were no God — forget God, and therefore 
have no faith in a just retribution for sin and no fear of it; forget 
God, and therefore spurn his law and trample down the rights of 
our common humanity: all such must have their doom, first as 
nations in the retributions of time; then as individuals in the 
more just — the perfectly just and complete retributions of eternity ! 

18. For the needy shall not always be forgotten : the 
expectation of the poor shall not perish forever. 

The "needy" are those especially who need God's protection 
against the oppressions of men both wicked and strong. They 
are thought of as defenseless save as God becomes their De- 
fender. He never fails to assume the care and defend the cause 
of those who, having no other refuge, cast themselves on him. 

19. Arise, O Lord ; let not man prevail : let the heathen 
be judged in thy sight. 

20. Put them in fear, O Lord : that the nations may 
know themselves to be bat men. Selah. 

" Let not man prevail," in the sense of being even for the 



44 



PSALM X. 



moment, stronger than God, or even of appearing to be so. Im- 
press the nations with a -wholesome fear of the Great God and let 
them know that frail man Against Almighty God is infinitely puny 
ancf powerless. 

PSALM X. 

By general consent of critics this Psalm bears a close relation 
to the ninth. The Septuagint and Vulgate unite them into one, 
led to do so probably, not only by a general similarity of theme, but 
by the fact that this has no distinct caption. Whenever the 
second of two consecutive Psalms has no caption, it is presumed 
to be by the same author, and ordinarily on a related theme, and 
consequently of the same date, constituting with the former a pair 
of Psalms. We shall see several cases verifying this principle. 

The writer expatiates upon the wickedness of the ungodly 

man, his antagonism against the righteous, his oppression of the 
weak, and his bold impiety toward God. He seems to conceive of 
an ideal wicked man rather than of any definite individual. 
Whereas the preceding Psalm contemplates nations as such 
arrayed against God's people, this treats of the wicked man with 
more definite reference to his personal and heart relations to sin, 
to God, and to God's suffering people. 

1. Why standest thou afar off, O Lord ? why hid est thou 
thyself in times of trouble ? 

This is said as if the Lord seemed to stand aloof and let the 
wicked have his own way in persecuting God's weak and afflicted 
people. Such is often the first and outside appearance of things in 
our world, due to the fact that probation preponderates over retri- 
bution and becomes the common law of the divine administration 
for the present state of our existence. While God waits on guilty 
men to give them space for repentance, they seize their opportunhy 
as space for bold impiety and outrageous wickedness. 

2. The wicked in his pride doth persecute the poor: let 
them be taken in the devices that they have imagined. 

The better construction of the first clause is this: "Under the 
pride of the wicked, the afflicted man burns, i. e., his heart burns 
with trial, grief, perplexity — and perhaps the implication is witli 
a feeling like that expressed in v. 1. The verb is future — will 
burn, i. e., may be expected to do so; will scarcely fail to feel this 

sore and burning trial. The last clause is either a future or an 

imperative : The wicked will be taken in the crafty devices which 
he has conceived; or, let him be, etc. In the latter case it would 
be the afflicted man's prayer. The sentiment — the wicked man 
falling into his own net — appears repeatedly in the previous 
Psalm. 



PSALM X. 



45 



3: For the wicked boasteth of his heart's desire, and 
blesseth the covetous, whom the Lord abhorreth. 

The last clause of this verse has been construed with great di- 
versity; thus: Acquiring unrighteous gain, he blesses those whom 
God abhors ; or blesses himself but contemns God ; or blesses the 
covetous whom the Lord abhors ; or blesses but still contemns 
God ; or finally and preferably on the whole to either of the pre- 
ceding, acquiring unrighteous gain, he parts company with and 
contemns God. The usual word for " bless," * from being used as 
a verb of farewell parting, is thought to shade off into the sense 
of parting from, terminating all social connection with. The 
wicked man, prospering in his .covetous schemes for unrighteous 
gain, abandons God, no longer feels a sense of dependence upon 
him, and even despises, contemns him. This is one of the fear- 
ful facts of human experience. The first clause is: The wicked 

gloats over the desire of his soul — makes a vain display of it. 

4. The wicked, through the pride of his countenance, 
will not seek after God : God is not in all his thoughts. 

The reader will notice that there are no Hebrew words corres- 
ponding to " after God"' 1 It therefore becomes a question whether 
the sense be as in our English version ; or thus : The wicked man, 
according to the pride of his countenance, says, God will not re- 
quite — will not make inquisition for human guilt. I incline to the 
latter construction both because this verb appears prominently in 
the previous Psalm (e. g., v. 12), and because it is fully in the 
spirit of the immediate context here; (e. g., " Thy judgments are 

far above out of his sight.") The first clause is expressive: 

''The wicked man, according to the loftiness of his look" (liter- 
ally of his nose). Like this lofty, proud look of his, so is his 

heart. All his thought is — no God. He is practically an 

atheist. He thinks and lives as if there were no God. God has 
no place in his thought. 

5. His ways are always grievous ; thy judgments are far 
above out of his sight : as for all his enemies, he puffeth 
at them. 

6. He hath said in his heart, I shall not be moved : for 
I shall never be in adversity. 

"Grievous," applied to his ways, is not so much in harmony 
with the course of thought as the sense strong, prosperous, — mean- 
ing either that he is strong and bold of heart, recklessly defying 
God ; or that his ways prosper for the time, and therefore he goes 
on with no misgivings, no compunctions, nothing to arrest or 
seriously trouble him in his career of crime. God's judgments 
are far up out of his sight, as if concealed away in the distance 
of the heavenly throne, and not brought down palpably within his 



3 




46 



PSALM X. 



view where he can not but feel their presence and know their 
reality. Of course he blows at his enemies contemptuously, and 
fears nothing in the future. This is put with great force : "lam 
not the man who shall ever be in calamity. The righteous have 
calamity enough for their portion ; but I am safe ! " 

7. His mouth is full of cursing and deceit and fraud : 
under his tongue is mischief and vanity. 

A more specific description of the wicked man, and first, of his 
words; sins of the tongue. "His mouth is full of cursing" — 
probably false swearing; and of deceit — for the same purpose; 
and oppression, extortion. " Under his tongue," as if coiled away 
there, like the poison of the serpent, are mischief and sin, this 
last word signifying what is void of all good — pure wickedness. 

8. He sittetli in the lurking places of the villages : in 
the secret places doth he murder the innocent : his eyes 
are privily set against the poor. 

9. He lieth in wait secretly as a lion in his den : he lieth 
in wait to catch the poor : he doth catch the poor, when he 
draweth him into his net. 

Here are his deeds, presented under the figure of one lying in 
wait secretly — a lion watching for his prey, a hunter laying his 
snares. 

10. He croucheth, and humbleth himself, that the poor 
may fall by his strong ones. 

The Hebrew verbs would be rendered much more in accordance 
with their usual sense if referred to the suffering victim, rather 
than to his oppressors, thus : " And crushed, he sinks down, yea, 
he falls — the afflicted do — under his strong ones; " the last words 
referring either to his powerful means of attack" or to his strong 
helpers. 

11. He hath said in his heart, God hath forgotten: he 
hideth his face ; he will never see it. 

The heart and thought of the wicked oppressor are put here in 
plain words : " God (he thinks) has forgotten all his promises of 
help to his afflicted people — all his responsibilities as moral gov- 
ernor of the world ; he has covered his own face so as to notice 

nothing; he will never see these deeds of mine." Ah! how 

strangely does he delude himself! But such are the ways of sin 
and of Satan! 

12. Arise, O Lord ; O God, lift up thine hand : forget 
not the humble. 

The Psalmist can no longer restrain himself, but cries out: 
" Arise, O God, for it is time for thee to manifest thy presence 



PSALM X. 



47 



and show thy hand ! Let it not be said, God has forgotten his 
helpless and suffering ones ! " 

13. Wherefore doth the wicked contemn God ? he hath 
said in his heart, Thou wilt not require it. 

"Wherefore do the wicked contemn God?" which may mean 
not merely, Why is he so infatuated as to do it? but, Why does 
God so far withdraw himself from human affairs as to suffer it? 
The former, however, is more in harmony with the context, the 
mind of the Psalmist being upon the inexpressible folly and false- 
hood of his saying in his heart, Thou wilt not require, i. e., make 
inquisition into human guilt — call the sinner to account; the same 
words which we have met repeatedly in this sense, e. g., 9 : 12 and 
10 : 4. This contemning God is 'the same spirit seen in v. 3 
above where the same verb appears, unfortunately translated 
" abhorreth," and referred to God rather than the sinner. With- 
out doubt, the sense both there and here alike, is that the wicked 
contemns God, despises him as one whose word of threatening 
against sin and sinners is not to be feared. It is specially in- 
sulting that the sinner should address this to God : " Thou wilt 
not require ! " 

14. Thou hast seen it; for thou beh oldest mischief and 
spite, to requite it with thy hand : the poor committeth 
himself unto thee ; thou art the helper of the fatherless. 

The sinner is utterly mistaken, "for thou hast seen" — for thou 
wilt always (future tense) look upon sorrow and grief [such as 
the sin of the wicked occasions] to give [the due reward] with 
thy hands. The helpless casts himself upon thee and leaves him- 
self in thy hands — both ideas being virtually involved in this He- 
brew clause. As to the orphan, thou hast [ever] been his helper. 

Thus the entire history of God's faithful care of his trustful 

people confronts the impious assumption of the wicked and shows 
that God will surely protect his suffering friends and requite their 
oppressors. 

15. Break thou the arm of the wicked and the evil man 
seek out his wickedness till thou find none. 

"Break" [shiver to atoms] "the arm of the wicked; " let him 
not defiantly exult in his vain strength against God ! " Seek out 
his wickedness — make inquisition for his sins" — the same word as 
repeatedly above. Search it all out thoroughly till no more re- 
mains to be found. 

16. The Lord is King forever and ever: the heathen 
are perished out of his land. 

Jehovah is King, moral governor, taking cognizance therefore 
vigilantly of all transgression, and with no intermission or end — 
forever and ever. This allusion to the heathen, the nations hostile 



48 



PSALM XI. 



to his people, carries us back to the scope of the previous Psalm, 
and serves to show the close relation between this and that. 

17. Lord, thou hast heard the desire of the humble: 
thou wilt prepare their heart, thou wilt cause thiue ear to 
hear : 

18. To judge the fatherless and the oppressed, that the 
man of the earth may no more oppress. 

To hear the longing desire is to hear and also to answer. And 
not only hast thou always done this in all thy past administration, 
but thou wilt make their heart firm [more precisely the sense than 
" prepare "] — thou wilt give them an assured and solid confidence. 
So surely wilt thou hear their cry for help, and so righteously wilt 
thou judge the orphan and the oppressed [literally the crushed 
ones], that the man of the earth will add no more to affright — 

will no more terrify or even alarm. "The man of the earth" 

is a phrase of rare occurrence, but probably is used as we say : 
" the man of the world," but with national allusion to the people 
outside of Palestine — the recognized enemies of God's children. 
Some critics, however, connect this clause with the verb here ren- 
dered "oppress," in this sense— so that frail man shall no more 
drive them out of the land. 

PSALM XI. 

This Psalm, ascribed to David, manifestly alludes to circum- 
stances personal to him. It is easy to find in the history of his 
persecutions from both Saul and Absalom circumstances to which 
these words might allude, but the correspondence between the 
facts of the history and the words of this song is so general that 
we can not confidently fix upon any precise point of time as its 
date oi* upon any particular event as its special occasion. The 
main thought is clear: "I have made the Lord my trust; there- 
fore I need not flee as if I had no refuge save in flight. The 
wicked may waylay me for my life; God shields the righteous, 
but sends awful judgments on the wicked: let this suffice me." 

1. In the Lord put I my trust: how say ye to my soul, 
Flee as a bird to your mountain ? 

"Say ye to my soul" — in a way to touch my sensibilities most 
acutely. I beg you (David would say) not to distress my soul 
with such counsels. Rather say words that will put vigor into 
my faith in God ; courage and calmness into my heart. Dur- 
ing the period of Saul's malign persecution, David did flee more 
than once to the mountain fastnesses of Judah. Probably at a 
later period, and perhaps in the early stages of Absalom's revolt, 



PSALM XL 



49 



his friends may have counseled his flight to the same mountains 
and may have drawn from him this first reply. 

2. For, lo, the wicked bend their bow, they make ready 
their arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at 
the upright in heart. 

Obviously, these also are the words of those who advised David 
to flee, assigning their reasons : For, lo, see, the wicked will tread 
their bow; they have fitted their arrow upon the string that they 
may shoot in the dark at the truly upright. They work so artfully 
in secret and have their schemes so well laid and so near their 
execution that you can not hope for safety otherwise than in flight. 

3. If the foundations be destroyed, what can the right- 
eous do ? 

Translating this verse with due regard to the Hebrew tenses 
and connecting words, we must read it : " For the foundations 
will be torn up; what have the righteous achieved?" That is, de- 
spite the influence of good men, the very foundations of society are 
uptorn. The last clause is not, What can, nor what will they do? 
but what have they done ? Very probably, however, this is implied : 
If they have been able to accomplish so little heretofore, when 
society still had some bottom, what will they be able to do after 
the bottom has fallen out and the foundations have been utterly 

torn up ? This also we may regard as part of the argument 

of David's ffiends, urging him to flight. This may have been the 
state of society at the breaking out of Absalom's rebellion. 

4. The Lord is in his holy temple, the Lord's throne is 
in heaven : his eyes behold, his eyelids try, the children of 
men. 

5. The Lord trieth the righteous : but the wicked and 
him that loveth violence his soul hateth. 

Here David answers. We are not, he would say, to reason on 
this case as if there were no God, or as if he had abandoned his 
throne in despair of maintaining moral order. Not at all. " The 
Lord is in his holy temple " — still abiding in the midst of his cov- 
enant people ; still true to his responsibilities to punish the wicked 

and avenge the righteous. The Lord is not only here in his 

earthly temple, but he has a higher throne in the heavens. From 
that lofty point of vision his eyes behold all the sons of men and 
try their deeds, weighing them, so to speak, in the scales of infi- 
nite justice. He also tries the righteous, with the result, how- 
ever, of approbation — in strong contrast with the hatred he feels 
toward the wicked and every lover of forceful oppression. 

6. Upon the wicked he shall rain snares, fire and brim- 
stone, and a horrible tempest : this shall be the portion of 
their cup. 



50 



PSALM XII. 



Having judged and condemned the ■wicked, he will also pun- 
ish — of which punishment this verse speaks, and in w T ords and 
figures fearfully appalling. Upon them God will rain [pour forth 
abundantly] lightnings [not "snares"], fire and brimstone, and 
the hot, scorching wind, i. e., the terrible sirocco of the desert; 
these are the portion of their cup — their assigned and righteous 

destiny. The latest lexicographers give the word rendered 

" snares " the sense, lightnings — altogether more pertinent in this 
connection. The Hebrew word for "horrible tempest" means 
precisely a burning wind, scorching blasts — with unquestionable 
reference to the well-known and most terrible sirocco. The case 
of the fires sent upon Sodom and Gomorrah is in the writer's 
mind, and he would say — God will make wicked men a second 
Sodom and pour forth upon them another deluge of fire and 
brimstone from the Lord out of heaven! Figures of speech 

these are, indeed, but figures of most fearful import! Their 

application to the wicked in the future world is not in the least 
softened and toned' down by saying that these are only the judg- 
ments which God sends on wicked nations and cruel oppressors 
in the present world. For if, despite of the necessary imperfec- 
tions and the manifold limitations of judgment upon men in 
this world, such figures come from the lips of God to express it, 
what will be the unmitigated, the perfect retribution of the eternal 
w T orld? What figures will ever be found adequate to measure 
that shoreless ocean of the sinner's woe? 

7. For the righteous Lord loveth righteousness; his 
countenance doth behold the upright. 

The logic of this verse in its connection should not be over- 
looked. u For" the reason why God has destined such awful 
judgments for the w r icked, is that, being righteous, he loves 
righteousness, and therefore can not endure wickedness — can not 
let it pass unpuuished — can not give it unrestrained range in his 

moral universe. His face looks [kindly] upon the upright. 

Grammarians notice that both the word for face ["countenance"] 
and the suffix corresponding to "his" are not singular but plural. 
The best explanation of this apparent anomaly is the same which 
we must give for the plural names of the Deity, e. g., Elohim. 
This only carries out the same idea — 11 their faces." 

PSALM XII. 

"Upon Sheminith " occurs in the caption of Ps. 6— in the sup- 
posed sense there as here of an octave below — a grave and proba- 
bly sorrowful tone. This Psalm makes no allusion to any 

special historical occasion. Wickedness abounds, especially false- 
hood and deception, and men are defiant toAvard God's authority 



PSALM XII. 



5 J 



and oppressive toward the defenseless. God will arise to their 
rescue and defense. 

1. Help, Lord ; for the godly man cease th ; for the 
faithful fail from among the children of men. 

Good, trustworthy men have almost disappeared from society. 
Amid the abounding wickedness of the times, David implores sal- 
vation from God. 

. 2. They speak vanity every one with his neighbor : with 
flattering lips and with a double heart do they speak. 

3. The Lord shall cut off all flattering lips, and the 
tongue that speaketh proud things : 

4. Who have said, With our tongue will we prevail ; our 
lips are our own : who is lord over us. 

" Vanity " is falsehood ; words good for nothing because not 

true. A "double heart" in the strong idiom of the Hebrew is 

" a heart and a heart" — one to hide and live by; another to show 
to the world and not to live by. But the Lord can not be de- 
ceived by such men. He utterly abhors their double heart and 
will cut them off for their sins. Expressively said, he will cut 

off those treacherous lips — that proud, lying tongue! Their 

spirit is further described as virtually saying, " With our tongue 
we are mighty ; " like heroes we say what we please : " our lips 
are with us," under our own exclusive control and we are respon- 
sible to nobody; ' ! who is Lord to us ?" Who shall dare dictate to 

us how we shall speak and what we may be allowed to say ? 

Wonderfully true to proud human nature ! 

5. For the oppression of the poor, for the sighing of the 
needy, now will I arise, saith the Lord ; I will set him in 
safety from him that puffeth at him. 

It is assumed that these poor and needy ones are sufferers un- 
der the falsehood, treachery and oppression, of the ungodly. 

Therefore for their sake God will arise to their rescue. The 

last clause of v. 5 will bear this construction : " I will put in 
safety him who pants for it; " i e. } him whose uplifted cry for 
help comes up to my throne. 

6. The words of the Lord are pure w T ords: as silver 
tried in a furnace of earth, purified seven times. 

7. Thou shalt keep them, O Lord, thou shalt preserve 
them from this generation forever. 

The words of the Lord are put in contrast with the words of 
the wicked — pure while those are foul ; true and perfectly relia- 
ble, while those are utterly treacherous. The inference just here 
is that when God promises to help his people or to cut off their 



52 



PSALM XIII. 



oppressors, you need not fear that his morels will fail. Therefore 
he will surely preserve his saints from all evil-doers forever. 

8. The wicked walk on every side, when the vilest men 
are exalted. 

The wicked walk to and fro, ranging at their will with lofty 
bearing, according as the vilest men are in power — more or less 
' according to the high position and influence of bad men. This 
construction — that of our English version — expresses an unques- 
tionable truth, and one not foreign to the scope of this Psalm, nor 
to the usual sense of these Hebrew words. Yet the last clause 
has been construed with very great diversity — by Gesenius and 
Maurer, "Like the rising of a tempest upon the sons of men;" 
by Kobinson and Fuerst, " When badness, vileness is set on high ; " 
while Alexander favors this: "Like exaltation is disgrace to the * 
sons of men," i. e,, the disgrace cast on the righteous is really to 
their honor because it proves them to be not with the wicked in 
heart, but with God." 

PSALM XIII. 

The tone of this Psalm is earnest expostulation, as if God had 
utterly forgotten his suffering friend. Ultimately he expresses his 
confidence in God, and rises to exultant joy and songs of praise. 

David probably passed through experiences of this sort more 

than once. They are not unusual in the life-history of God's 
people. It is well therefore that such a Psalm should have a 
place in the devotional songs of Zion, evermore impressing the 
precious truth that God's trustful children will surely come forth 
from every affliction, however sore, with a song of praise; that 
God will not forget them forever; that, having put their faith to 
stern trial, he will make this very trial yield the fruit of a purer 
and stronger faith, a richer joy in God. and a firmer footing upon 
his promises. 

1. How long wilt thou forget me, O Lord? for ever? 
how long wilt thou hide thy face from me ? 

2. How long shall I take counsel in my soul, having 
sorrow in my heart daily? how long shall mine enemy be 
exalted over me ? 

The special form of this trial seems to have been oppression 
from some personal enemy, with very probable reference to Saul. 
His "taking counsel with a sad heart daily," refers to plans of 
action looking toward escape, relief, or the conciliation of his 
enemy, such (e. g.) as David often had with Jonathan. Repeated 
failure extorted the cry, " How long, Lord, wilt thou forget me and 
cast me off?" It seemed to him it would be forever ! 



PSALM XIV. 



3. Consider and hear me, O Lord my God : lighten 
mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death ; 

4. Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him ; 
and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved. 

"Consider" means look kindly upon me. Let light break in 
upon my darkness and gladden my dimmed eyes, lest I sleep the 
death — with possible allusion to the usual dimness of vision in old 
age or from approaching death. "When I am moved" — dis- 
lodged from my strong position; thrown into fresh trouble and 
solicitude. 

5. But I have trusted in thy mercy ; my heart shall 
rejoice, in thy salvation. 

6. I will sing unto the Lord, because he hath dealt 
bountifully with me. 

A sudden change comes over his spirit and finds expression here. 
1 have trusted and will still trust in God's mercy. " My very 
heart" (stronger than if he had said only 1) I with all my heart 

will rejoice in thy salvation. In the phrase "Dealt bountifully 

with me," the original words suggest the thought of blessings con- 
ferred upon me abundantly. 

~^CX> ^ 

PSALM XIV. 

This Psalm bears a very close resemblance to Ps. 53. Both are 
ascribed to David. The principal variations occur between Ps. 14: 
5, 6, and Ps. 53 : 5. In general the variations between these two 
Psalms fall under these two heads: (a.) The names of the Deity. 
In four instances the name "Lord" [Hebrew, Jehovah] in Ps. 14 
becomes "God" [Elohim] in Ps. 53. Jehovah is not used at all in 
the latter Psalm, (b. ) A weaker expression in Ps. 14 gives place 

to a stronger one in Ps. 53. These comparative points make it 

probable if not certain that David wrote Ps. 14 first in time, and 
subsequently revised it with a few alterations as we have them in 
Ps. 53. The former, it will be noticed, appears in the first of the 
five books ; the latter in the second, the compilation of which ob- 
viously bears date many years later. The general theme is the 

deep depravity, the moral corruption of the race. They recognize 
no God; they seek him not; call not on his name; do abominable 
deeds ; absolutely none are doers of good : they persecute and 
devour God's people and despise them for their trust in God — 
which points naturally elicit the prayer that God would save his 

people out of Zion. Whether the "Nabal" of 1 Sam. 25 sat for 

the picture of this nabal ["the fool"], it may not be possible to 
determine with certainty. I see no objection to the supposition 
that his case suggested this Psalm, and yet we know too little of 



54 



PSALM XIV. 



him to affirm it as unquestionable. The Xabal of Mfc Carniel was 
thoroughly selfish and wicked, far enough from having any sym- 
pathy with David in his great trial as a persecuted man of God. 
Not unnaturally, therefore, David might make him the text for this 
brief presentation of the great points of the wicked man's char- 
acter. 

1. The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. 
They are corrupt, they have done abominable works, there 
is none that doeth good. 

Some have supposed the precise meaning of the first clause to 
be — would there were no God! — a mere wish in the fool's heart 
that there were none. This may be true of the wicked fool, but it 
can not be the precise and whole truth expressed here. It might 
be said doubtless that " the wish is father to this thought," but the 
child and not the father is the thing spoken of here. This product 
of wicked, selfish desire is atheism, not in theory but in thought 
and in act. His thinking presupposes no God ; his acts are as if 

there were none. The writer's usage of the phrase, "Say in 

one's heart," maybe seen sufficiently in Ps. 10: 6, 11, 13, where 
this same atheistic and wicked man is the subject, one who "will 
not seek after God;" " God is not in all his thoughts." " He hath 
said in his heart, I shall not be moved;" "He hath said in 
his heart, God hath forgotten;" "He hath said in his heart, 
thou wilt not require," i. e., make inquisition for sin. In the 
same sense here, he says' in his heart, Xo God! He repels all 
thought of God; he lays his schemes for wickedness as if there 
Avere no God ; hardens himself in sin as if nothing were to be 
feared from God. He says this in his heart, not perhaps openly, 
not to the public ear. But it is the inner thought of the man, and 

it gives shape to his actual life. Practically, he is godless. The 

consequences of this practical atheism the Psalmist proceeds to 
unfold. The first verb, translated ''are corrupt," is equivalent to 
our English word destroy, and may well be taken to mean, They 
have wrought destruction, they have made their moral nature a 

ruin. The next clause might be rendered, They have made 

their deeds abominable, or They have done abominable wicked- 
ness — the noun that follows the verb having either the usual sense of 
deed, a thing done, or the unusual sense of wickedness, like the par- 
allel word in Ps. 53. The general sense is essentially the same either 

way. "There is no doer of good," affirms the universal fact of 

depravity. These, it should be remembered, are the fruits of 

practical atheism. The sense of a great and holy God very near, 
evermore noting all human thought and act, ever impressing 
human souls with his purity and his love, is a power perpetually 
restraining from sin, evermore transforming men to like purity and 
love. But when human depravity rules all such thought and 
sense of God out of the mind, the soul gravitates downward under 
the terrible force of its own depravity — a moral wreck, its noblest 
powers a mass of ruins ! 



PSALM XIV. 



55 



2. The Lord looked down from heaven upon the children 
of men, to see if there were any that did understand, 
and seek God. 

This "looking down" has the precise sense of bending ^ over as 
if from his high throne, much as was said of God looking into 
the corrupt state of the world just before the flood (Gen. 6 : 12) ; 
or into Sodom (Gen. 18: 21). So here he bends over to scrutinize 
closely the moral state of man, and especially to " see if any 
were acting wisely" [not as the "fool"] "and seeking God," 
as the wise man would. This assumes that the truly wise will 
seek after God as surely as the fool will not, but will even ignore 
his very being. 

3. They are all gone aside, they are all together become 
filthy : there is none that doeth good, no, not one. 

"The all" [says the Hebrew], the whole body, have apostatized 
together; they have become morally corrupt; as the original im- 
plies, have turned sour and putrid under a process analogous to 

decomposition by chemical change. "No doer of good, not 

even one," makes the statement perfectly sweeping, shutting off 
all possible exception. Of course this contemplates man as he is 
without God, never seeking God, and of course unblessed by gos- 
pel grace. 

4. Have all the workers of iniquity no knowledge? who 
eat up my people as they eat bread, and call not upon 
the Lord. 

Is it credible that all these workers of iniquity are utterly with- 
out knowledge? i. e., do they not know better than to persecute 
my people and so incur my wrath ? They are eating up my peo- 
ple as men eat bread ; say with avidity, or with like pleasure, or 
equally without compunction, and they never worship God, this 

being the usual sense of "calling upon God." -It seems to be 

implied that these wicked fools, giving themselves up to reckless 
persecution of God's people, do certainly know better — must know 
that such sin will bring down upon them the wrath of Almighty God. 

5. There were they in great fear ; for God is in the gen- 
eration of the righteous. 

" There," at this precise point, when they have provoked God 
by devouring his people, " they become awfully afraid," for "God 
is in the generation of the righteous" — will surely manifest his 
presence with them — their Helper and Avenger in all such seasons 
of need. 

6. Ye have shamed the counsel of the poor, because the 
Lord is his refuge. 

"The counsel of the afflicted 1 ' [better than "poor"] is the 
product of their wisdom in its relations to God — their wisdom as 



56 



PSALM XV. 



dictating trust in God and obedience. You put to shame their 
trust in God as being in your eyes folly. You despise them for 
making God their refuge. How great and fatal is your mistake! 

7. Oh that the salvation of Israel tvere come out of Zion ! 
when the Lord bringeth back the captivity of his people, 
Jacob shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad. 

Literally thus: "Who will give out of Zion the salvation of 
Israel in God's returning to the captives of his people" [or turn- 
ing the captivity of his people] ? " Let Jacob rejoice ; let Israel 
be glad! " " Who will give" is a common Hebrew idiom equiv- 
alent to, O that it might be so! That this salvation is thought 

to come out of Zion results from the fact that the Zion-temple was 
the recognized dwelling-place of Israel's God from whom this sal- 
vation came. Some critics, supposing the language here to 

refer to the restoration from captivity in Babylon, maintain that 
the Psalm must have been written after that event. But there is 
no occasion to apply the words to that restoration. Long before 
that period this phrase, "turn the captivity," had come into cur- 
rent figurative use where no real restoration from a proper cap- 
tivity could have been thought of, e. g., Job. 42: 10, where the 
Lord changed the captive state of Job as it were from bondage to 
liberty, yet Job was by no means a prisoner of war. So also God 
spake by Ezekiel (16: 53) of "turning the captivity of Sodom," 
where no literal restoration from a land of captivity is possible. 
Moreover, this precise form of the Hebrew verb may be trans- 
lated either, God returns to his captive people; or, he turns 
their captive state from one of quasi bondage to one of freedom. 
According to the Masoretic interpunction and the proper con- 
struction of the Hebrew verbs ["rejoice and be glad '], the last 
clause stands independent of what precedes, a sudden transition 
from prayer for salvation to a call for joy and gladness in Israel 
under the assurance that his prayer is answered. " Let Jacob 
rejoice : let Israel be glad! " 

PSALM XV. 

This Psalm of David corresponds so closely with portions of 
Ps. 24 that we can scarcely hesitate to refer it to the same oc- 
casion, viz! : the location of the ark on Mount Zion, (see 2 Sam. 6, 
and 1 Chron. 13). It was thus made the visible dwelling place 
of Israel's God, and therefore would suggest the question, Who now 
shall be honored to dwell with God in this holy hill ? Who shall en- 
joy this exalted privilege of special communion and fellowship with 
God, and consequently of his perpetual protection? This question 

it is the purpose of the Psalm to answer. As a description of 

the thoroughly righteous man it stands in direct contrast with Ps. 
14, which is a corresponding description of an intensely wicked 



PSALM XV. 



57 



man. This contrast may account for its location here rather 
than in connection with Ps. 24. 

1. Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle ? who shall 
dwell in thy holy hill ? 

"Abide in thy tabernacle" — at home and made welcome there 
as being of the household of God, one of his intimate friends and 
therefore enjoying his protection. The tabernacle was now lo- 
cated on the Zion hill, in the city of David. See the historical 
account of this transaction (2 Sam. 6: 12-19). 

2. He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteous- 
ness, and speaketh the truth in his heart. 

He whose walk, daily life, is unblemished, faultless ; whose 
doings are right; who speaks truth with sincere heart, i. e., always 
aiming to say only the exact truth. These are positive traits and 
manifestations. 

3. He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil 
to his neighbor, nor taketh up a reproach against his neigh- 
bor. 

Here are negatives — the things he does not. He does not 
slander; literally, foot it about with the tongue, which seems to des- 
cribe one who goes round tattling, speaking slanderously. Does 

not do evil to his neighbor [intentionally] ; does not take up a 
reproachful rumor against his neighbor — not into his heart to be- 
lieve and love it, and much less to help push it on. 

4. In whose eyes a vile person is contemned ; but he 
honoreth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his 
own hurt, and changeth not. 

"The despicable man," one worthy to be despised, is in his eyes 
rejected, contemned, according as his true character deserves. 

While he despises bad men, he honors the truly pious. The 

last clause alludes to Lev. 5 : 4, the case of one who takes an oath 
unadvisedly, i. e., without due reflection, binding himself to do 
some act which will involve him in evil or in good, and is holden 
by the sacredness of his oath. A part only of the full phrase 
appears here — the case of swearing to do something which will 
naturally be an evil to himself. From this oath the good man 

changes not, recedes not, but faithfully stands to his bond. 

Some modern critics translate " that sweareth to a bad man; " but 
this can not be accepted. The allusion to the Levitical law as 
above can not well be questioned. 

5. He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor 
taketh reward against the innocent. He that doeth these 
things shall never be moved. 



58 



PSALM XVI. 



This usury is not interest on money which is borrowed to make 
more money with — a commercial transaction of which the Mosaic 
law had no occasion to speak ; but is money loaned to a poor man 
as the law required bread to be loaned to the suffering, upon 
which no interest was permitted. In the current life of the He- 
brew people, no man borrowed either money or bread save under 
the stress of hunger, necessity, of which stress no neighbor, well 

to do himself, was permitted to take advantage. A bribe to harm 

the innocent was an abomination to the Mosaic law — is so to all 

righteous law — to every upright conscience. " Shall never be 

moved" — shall have a sure standing in the house of God, ever- 
more enjoying his protection and never jostled from his sure foun - 
dation. 

PSALM XVI. 

The caption ascribes this Psalm to David. The one question 
of interpretation here which eclipses all others in importance is 
that of the eunuch to Philip concerning Isa. 53: "I pray thee, 
of whom spake the prophet this ; of himself, or of some other 
man?" (Acts 8: 34.) The same answer is to be given here as 
there; the interpreter must expound his scripture "of Jesus." 

The subject naturally opens with the fact that David was a 
prophet and wrote some prophecies. The apostle Peter himself, 
at that moment under unquestionable inspiration (Acts 2: 30), 
affirms this : u Therefore the patriarch David, being a prophet, and 
knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit 
of his loins according to the flesh, he would raise up Christ to sit 
on his throne," etc. This passage indeed carries us one step 
further and affirms on like authority and with equal certainty that 
as a prophet, David spake of Christ. "He [David] seeing this 
before (i. e., foreseeing it with prophetic eye) spake of the resur- 
rection of Christ that his soul was not left in hell, neither his flesh 
did see corruption." Here Peter quotes from the Psalm now be- 
fore us, and had previously quoted from it yet more fully in this 

very discourse (vs. 25-28). With a more brief quotation but 

no less clearly and to the same purport precisely Paul (Acts 13 : 
33-37) quotes from this Psalm to prove that the promised Mes- 
siah was not to experience corruption in the grave, but was to be 
raised from the dead before that change should take place. He 
even argues the point specifically to show that these words of the 
Psalm before us can not refer to David because he died as other 
men die, and "was laid to his fathers and saw corruption," 

according to the common lot of mortals. Entirely coincident 

with this testimony to the point that the Psalm contains predic- 
tions of Christ is the authority of Jesus himself, who after his 
resurrection (Luke 24 : 44-46) said to his disciples, " All things 
must be fulfilled which were written in the law of Moses, and in 



PSALM XVI. 



50 



the Prophets, and in the Psalms concerning me." " Then opened 
he their understanding that they might understand the scriptures, 
and said unto them, Thus it behooved Christ to suffer and to rise 
from the dead the third day." It seems therefore that Jesus spake 
at this time particularly .of his resurrection as a point embraced 
in the Old Testament Prophecies. Inasmuch as the disciples who 
heard this conversation refer to no other prophecy as foretelling 
his resurrection except this one in our Psalm, and inasmuch as 
they do refer to this with special stress and a special argument 
to prove its necessary reference to Christ, there is no reason to 
doubt that they had their interpretation from Jesus himself. 
With those therefore who accept the authority of Jesus there re- 
mains no further question. With all those who admit the divine 
inspiration of Peter after the great effusion of the Spirit upon him, 
or of Paul after his conversion and special anointing as an apos- 
tle, there remains no further question on the point that this Psalm 
treats of Christ and definitely predicts his resurrection from the 
dead. 

But there are other questions pertaining to this Psalm that should 
receive attention. Does it all refer to Christ ? Does any part of 
it refer to David ? Is it admissible to assume that the same 
words refer both to David and to Christ? Why does David 
speak in the first person as if of himself only ? How can we de- 
termine in such a case whether he does really speak of himself, 

or of some other man, e. g., Jesus the Messiah ? It will be quite 

as well to meet these questions as they are presented in this Psalm, 
as to put the answer in the more general form. 1 therefore re- 
ply thus: (1.) Every specific feature in this entire Psalm admits 
of a natural, easy, and very appropriate reference to Christ. This 
will appear as we examine it word by word, verse by verse. Con- 
sequently there is no demand whatever for applying any part of 

it to David. (2.) There are some features in the Psalm which 

positively will not bear to be applied to David. This both Peter and 
Paul have shown on the point of experiencing the corruption of 
the grave. Therefore we absolutely know that the Messiah is 
here. No other person fills the description; no other can be the 

subject spoken of. There are also various other features of 

this description which apply with much greater pertinence and 
force to the Messiah than to David. That some features should be 
common to both David and Christ, L e., applicable to either, need 
not surprise us and will not when we consider that Jesus was truly 
human no less than divine ; that his human nature was prominent 
in his sufferings and indeed during his entire state of humiliation 
while he was on earth; and that David in more than one respect 

was a special type or representative of the Messiah. (3.) This 

latter fact sufficiently accounts for the form in which this Psalm 
appears — David speaking iti the first person, while yet he speaks 
not of himself but of some other one, viz., that greater personage 
who was to be his Son, to sit on his throne, to pass through ex- 
periences of trial and affliction on earth, in many points analogous 



hi) 



PSALM XVI. 



to those periods in his own life, -when though anointed to be king 
he yet was persecuted, despised, and rejected by the reigning au- 
thorities of the nation. It is no part of our work as interpreters 

of prophecy to ascertain and show how far the prophet David un- 
derstood what the Spirit spake through him of Christ. It would 
be a very interesting inquiry if we had the data for developing it 
and for reaching positive knowledge in the case; but what if we 
have not? The words which holy men spake as they were moved 
by the Holy Ghost remain to us just the same for our instruction, 
good for the truth they teach us, whether we can or can not ascer- 
tain how far the prophet David understood them. In fine, this 

Psalm (and all other prophecies on the same conditions) must be 
accepted as real prophecy upon the following points of proof in 
this case : That Jesus or his inspired apostles, or both, quote 
them as prophecy ; that the passage in question is applicable as 
prophecy to Christ, easily and pertinently ; that there are points 
in it which can not be applied to any one else. These reasons 
seem to be entirely valid and conclusive. The reader will notice 
that Peter and Paul follow precisely this mode of proving that 
the Psalm before us is a prophecy of Christ. They had their in- 
terpretation from Christ himself; they argue that its points apply 
readily to Jesus, and can not apply to David or any one else. 

Some of my readers may push the further question — Whether 
this Psalm does not speak of David and of Christ both, saying of 
David all that can apply to him, and of Christ all that applies fitly 
to him. The main objection to this is, that it is against the na- 
ture of mind and therefore of speech to have two objects of 
thought and speech before the mind at once. For example, our 
Psalm is an expression of what we may call heart-experience — the 
emotions, sentiments, pious exercises of some Christian heart. 
Every statement is in the singular number, by one speaker, and 
as if of himself. My argument is that it is against nature and 
contrary to the normal action of finite minds to suppose that such 
language speaks equally of two different persons. Ever so many 
thousands may have a similar experience ; that is entirely another 
matter. Our question is, Does such language primarily and prop- 
erly contemplate more than one subject, one person, as saying 
these words and having these emotions ? If he were to say, 11 1 
am speaking now, not for myself only, but for another man equally 
and as well," then we must take his meaning as thus specially 
explained; but, otherwise, we must naturally understand him to 
speak of himself only. If he is a prophet, he may speak exclu- 
sively of some great personage who is the subject of his prophetic 
communications. Unity of thought and of intent is thus fully 
maintained. Such unity of thought and of speech is the recog- 
nized and universal law of human speech in all language, unless 
prophecy be an exception. My position is that prophecy can not 
be made an exception — that this law must obtain equally in all 
prophetic language, for the simple reason that in his word (proph- 
ecy included) God speaks to man in man's words — in human lan- 



PSALM XVI. 



61 



guage and in accordance with the well-known laws of human 
speech. If he spake otherwise, on other principles, under other 
laws of speech, we could never reach his meaning with any cer- 
tainty or with any well-grounded confidence. 1 hardly need say 

that the view here presented in opposition to what is often called 
"the double sense," has no conflict whatever with the true doc- 
trine of prophetic types, i. e., of representative men, or represent- 
ative institutions which serve to illustrate Christ and his work. 
The second Psalm may take its imagery and many of its promi- 
nent words from the case of David. Yet it meant not David but 
Christ. It speaks of Christ in words and figures that were made 
clear to the Jewish mind by their knowledge of the sources whence 
they were taken ; in other words, by their knowledge of the his- 
tory of David. So David's experience as a suffering man of God 
may furnish more or less of the words and figures in this six- 
teenth Psalm. But this is very far from proving that these words, 

as used here, speak of David. This discussion would be an 

unpardonable digression if it were not the case that the subject 
has involved many minds in immense perplexity and confusion. 

Let us now resume the Psalm. The question of date in this 

Psalm has no practical importance. As to occasion, we only 

require two conditions : (1) The suffering periods of David's life; 
(2) The light of inspiration suggesting to him that his greater 
Son was to have experiences in this point similar to his own. 

The word " Michtam " in the title is explained variously by the 
best critics. It occurs at the head of five other Psalms (56-60) ; 
is thought by Gesenius, Fuerst, and Maurer to mean simply a writ- 
ing, analogous to the similar word in Isa. 38 : 9, at the head of 
Hezekiah's song. The ancient versions, indorsed by Prof. Stuart, 
make it an inscription, equivalent to "song of victory;" while 
Alexander supposes it to indicate something secret, deep — " the 
depth of doctrinal and spiritual import in those sacred compo- 
sitions." The etymological affinities of the word are too obscure 
and its meaning too doubtful to afford any aid in the interpreta- 
tion of the Psalm. 

1. Preserve me, O God : for in thee do I put my trust. 

In view of what has been said above of the reference of this 
Psalm to the Messiah, it is a perfectly reasonable supposition that 
it was written in prophetic anticipation of his experiences at 
some time, probably not long prior to his death. Several pas- 
sages in his recorded history suffice to show that more than once 
his mind was thrown strongly upon those final conflicts of trial 
and suffering through which he was destined to pass. Luke re- 
cords that in his transfiguration " there talked with him two men, 
who were Moses and Elias : who appeared in glory, and spake of 
his decease which he should accomplish at Jerusalem " (Luke 9 : 
30, 31). John reports these words of his (12: 27) : "Now is my 
soul troubled, and what shall I say? Father, save me from this 



62 



PSALM XVI. 



hour ? [Nay,] since for this cause came I unto this hour. Father, 
glorify thy name." And Luke, these : "I have a baptism to be 
baptized with (i. e., of fearful suffering), and how am 1 straitened 
until it be accomplished?" (12: 50.) The scenes of Gethsemane 
are familiar to every Bible reader. The spirit of those scenes of 
agony came over him more than once in his previous experience. 
This Psalm is fully in harmony with Gethsemane — those antici- 
pations of trial and anguish, coupled with sweet repose in God, 
and on the whole a joyful acquiescence in his mission, with all its 
results of temporary suffering, but eternal, glorious reward. Let 
us, then, assume that the Psalm gives us a chapter in these heart- 
experiences of our Lord at some period not very long prior to his 
death. 

"Preserve me, O God;" uphold me in these scenes of sore 
trial — in these anticipations of untold agony soon to be endured — 
" for in thee do I seek a refuge." This is more precise than our 
English "put my trust," since the Hebrew verb conceives of one 
as flying for refuge from some threatened evil. 

2. 0 my soul, thou hast said unto the Lord, Thou art 
my Lord : my goodness extendeth not to thee ; 

3. But to the saints that are in the earth, and to the ex- 
cellent, in whom is all my delight. 

"My soul hath said to Jehovah, Thou art my Lord;" i. e., I 
have said it with all my heart. The Hebrews used the word 
"soul" in this way for stronger emphasis. It did not express 
adequately the strength of the speaker's feelings to say simply, 
"I have made Jehovah my Lord." Thus I understand this quite 
peculiar Hebrew phrase. The word for " soul " is implied, not ex- 
pressed, but is indicated by the corresponding gender (feminine) 
in the verb, and by its second person, implying that the soul is 

addressed. Thus Jesus accepted Jehovah, the ever-faithful God, 

as his Lord and his God, and made the strongest declaration of 

it which the Hebrew language and idioms can make. In the 

next clause there is no Hebrew word for "extendeth." It is there- 
fore supplied arbitrarily, and the resulting sense does not recom- 
mend it. Prof. Stuart proposes a very animated construction, 
thus: "Source of my happiness; there is none beside thee," ap- 
plying the word for "goodness" to God in direct address. Less 
violent and more probable is this reading: "My happiness is 
nothing without thee;" I have no real joy save in thee. As to 
the saints in the earth — "the excellent ones — all my delight is in 
them," k e., all the delight I find on the earth, in the society of 
mortals. On the one hand, in the highest possible sense, God is 
the sole and infinite joy of his heart; but on the other, in a lower 
sense, God's people who bear his image are precious to his soul, 

the only congenial society of earth. It is pleasant to dwell on 

these words as setting before us the very heart and soul of Him 
whom "not having seen we love." They arc remarkably in har- 



PSALM XVI. 



63 



mony with both his words and his life as given us in the gospel 

history. We pause here a moment over the suggestion that in 

the strength and fullness of these declarations, their reference to 
Jesus is easy and every way right, but if referred to David, they 
seem overdone, fulsome, and therefore scarcely admissible. 

4. Their sorrows shall be multiplied that hasten after 
another god : their drink offerings of blood will I not offer, 
nor take up their names into my lips. 

The word for " sorrows," by a slight change in its vowels, is 
used for idol gods, thought of as made laboriously by human hands. 
Very probably this word is chosen out of several which would 
have the sense, sorroiv, because it suggested the miseries of idol- 
worshipers — the painful unrest of those who have no better Gcd 

than a manufactured idol. The verb rendered "hasten" is of 

rare occurrence, yet in one clear case (Ex. 22: 15) is used for 
buying a wife, and very probably is chosen here with tacit allu- 
sion to idolatry as spiritual harlotry — going adulterously away 
from the true God to marry idol gods. The sense of the verse is 
plain : While I have infinite joy in the blessed God, and a lesser 
joy in his beloved people, they who give their hearts to idol gods 
have their sorrows multiplied ; sorrow upon sorrow. My soul 
turns from them with loathing; their drink-offerings are nothing 
better than blood, and I can never offer them nor pollute my lips 

with even their names ! If it be asked, Why should Jesus speak 

thus of idol gods inasmuch as during his life on earth, idolatry 
was unknown among the Jews? the answer is that this Psalm was 
written by David, to be read and sung in his age and in subse- 
quent ages when idolatry was the giant sin of the world. It was 
therefore every way appropriate that the Messiah should be put 

before the Jews as intensely abhorring idolatry. As to the 

comparative facility of making these the words of Jesus on 
the one hand or of David on the other — as said by Jesus it is 
perfect. On the other side, there is no doubt that David abhorred 
idol gods ; yet in those Psalms where he certainly speaks of him- 
self, such declarations as this occur rarely if ever. 

5. The Lord is the portion of mine inheritance and of 
my cup : thou maintainest my lot. 

6. The lines are fallen unto me in pleasant places ; yea, 
I have a goodly heritage. 

Jehovah is my chosen portion, mine inheritance — the good which 

my soul rejoices in for above all other. These several words, 

"inheritance," "cup," "lot," concur in the common idea of one's 
chosen and accepted good. So in the same sense, "the lines," 
i. e.. the measuring lines which lay out one's grounds and define 
his landed possessions — taken from the vocabulary of an agricul- 
tural people to signify the possessions themselves. The sentiment 
of verse 6 is — I am happy and satisfied with my assigned mission 



64 



PSALM XVI. 



and its reward. Jesus surveys the whole work allotted to him, 
with its promised reward, and joyfully accepts it. "For the joy 
set before him, he endures the cross " [heroically], "despising the 
shame." 

7. I will bless the Lord, who hath given rue counsel : my 
reins also instruct me in the night seasons. 

The "counsel" given him by the Lord, I take in the special 
sense of encouragement, exhortation — those inspirations of faith 
and courage and love by which the Father sustained him through 
every hour of sorest temptation and trial. The original word sug- 
gests this special sense. Well might the Messiah say, I will bless 
Jehovah, my faithful God, for these suggestions and for this moral 

strength in my seasons of need. The last clause of the verse 

thus : " Yea, in the night season, my reins," i. e., my deep thoughts, 
"admonish," suggest to me to bless and thank him. As I muse 
in the deep night I am sweetly moved to bless the Lord for his 
sustaining mercy. 

8. I have set the Lord always before me : because lie is 
at my right hand, I shall not be moved. 

Of set purpose and by direct effort, I place the Lord Jehovah . 
ever before my face. I keep him in my constant view. Every 
thought and purpose are shaped under a sense of his present eye 
and hand. Because he is at my right hand, ever ready to uphold 
me, I shall not be moved from my sure foundation, but shall stand 
securely. 

9. Therefore my heart is glad, and my glory rejoiceth : 
my flesh also shall rest in hope. 

Therefore the Messiah has a perfect assurance of success in his 
great mission, and rejoices in it exceedingly. In the strong Hebrew 
idiom, his heart exults; his "glory," i. e., his soul, his noblest pow- 
ers^ rejoice. The word rendered "glory" means properly the heavy 
organ, the liver ; but corresponds perfectly in figurative usage with 
our word heart. Even in death my flesh shall rest in the confi- 
dent hope of a speedy resurrection. 

10. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell ; neither 
wilt thou suffer thine Holy One to see corruption. 

Literally, "thou wilt not leave my soul to hell," i. e., surrendered 
to its power. The word Sheol, translated hell, is here (as not in- 
frequently) personified to represent the ruling Power of that world 
of the dead. To that Power, God will not leave him — said with 
more special reference to his body than to his soul, considered as 
the spiritual part of his compound being. So the parallel clause 
clearly implies — "nor wilt thou give thy Holy One to see corrup- 
tion: " thou wilt not leave thy son to experience the corruption of 
the body in the grave, but wilt raise him from the dead before 



PSALM XVI. 



Go 



corruption ensues. The last word of this verse, translated 

"corruption," has been regarded as the test word of this passage, 
claimed by those who deny its reference to Christ to mean simply 
the pit, the grave. Insisting upon the reference of this Psalm en- 
tire to David only, they are forced to evade the sense, corruption, 
since in this sense it could not apply to David. Hence they derive 
the word Shahhath * from another root Shuah f which means pit. 
But the root Shahhath — to destroy or corrupt, is the more natural 
one and has most usage in its favor, and moreover, has the full 
support of the Septuagint whose Greek word, meaning corruption, 
passed into the New Testament and received the practical indorse- 
ment of the apostles because they made their main argument from 
prophecy for the resurrection of Christ turn on this precise sense 
of our word. The authorities are therefore quite decisive in favor 

of the meaning, corruption. In this construction the sentiment 

is every way appropriate. It was fit that the Great Conqueror of 
death should burst its bands and come forth from its control before 
even his body had experienced that decomposition by which death 
and the grave despoil the beauty of man and remand his flesh back 
to dust. Of this the Messiah was made sure on the authority of 
prophetic inspiration. His own words to his disciples long before 
his death show that he knew he should rise from the dead and 
even on the third day, before corruption had really begun its 
work. (See Matt. 16: 21, and £0: 19). 

11. Thou wilt show me the path of life : in thy presence 
is fullness of joy ; at thy right hand there are pleasures for 
evermore. 

Thou wilt guide me to perfect bliss in thy presence, joys eternal 
at thy right hand. " Fullness of joy " has the sense in the Hebrew 
of satiety, that which will fully satisfy the utmost desires of the 

soul. "At thy right hand" reminds us that the risen Jesus is 

continually represented as enthroned at the right hand of the 

Father, in supreme dignity and glory. These visions of future 

reward were "the joy set before him" for which "he endured the 
cross and despised the shame." (Heb. 12: 2). Isaiah touches the 
same fact in the words, " He shall see of the travail of his soul and 
be satisfied." (53 : 11.). Such self-sacrificing benevolence will be 
rewarded with infinite exaltation and blessedness, not only because 
such reward is intrinsically fit, but for the sake of its moral lessons 
to the universe of intelligent minds. Paul sets forth the same log- 
ical and moral relation between Christ's extreme humiliation on 
the one hand, and his infinite exaltation on the other, in the 
memorable words (Phil. 2: 6-11), "Wherefore (because he hum- 
bled himself and became obedient even to the extent of death on 
the cross, therefore) God hath highly exalted him and given him a 
name above every name." 



66 



PSALM XVII. 



Thus this wonderful prophetic Psalm witnesseth to the Great 
Messiah, giving us his various heart-experiences of anticipated suf- 
fering, of peaceful repose in God, of joyful acquiescence in his work 
(the suffering included), for the sake of the joy set before him ; re- 
vealing also his confident assurance of a speedy resurrection from 
the grave, followed by perfect, eternal bliss at God's right hand. 
What should interest us more than to know how Jesus met and 
bore his anticipated sufferings, and how absolutely his soul was 
filled with love and trust toward his heavenly Father and with joy 
in his mission of suffering because of its results in the salvation 
of men and the infinite glory of God ? 

OO^OO 

PSALM XVII. 

This Psalm of David is comprehensively and appropriately 
called a prayer. It is the outpouring of a pious heart before God 
under bitter persecution from malicious enemies — enemies who 
manifestly had slandered and even maligned him, and therefore 
made it proper for him to assert his innocence and integrity. He 
casts himself upon God for justice and for succor from his ene- 
mies. This Psalm corresponds well to the experiences of David, 

persecuted by Saul. • 

1. Hear the right, O Lord, attend unto my cry ; give ear 
unto my prayer, that goeth not out of feigned lips. 

This prayer, "Hear the right," implies a full consciousness of 
personal uprightness as to the points involved between the sup- 
pliant and his adversaries. He does not ask of God any favor- 
itism or partiality, but simple righteousness. The prayer 

which he offers goes forth from lips not deceitful, but which speak 
truly what an honest heart feels. 

2. Let my sentence come forth from thy presence; let 
thine eyes behold the things that are equal. 

"My sentence" is my judgment or decree as from a court of 
justice or from the Supreme King. The verbs in Hebrew are 
future, as if expressing his strong assurance, yet put in such a 
way as to imply the prayer that such things may yet be. " My 
sentence shall come forth from thy throne (let it not fail so to come !) ; 
" thine eyes will discern all equity" (so may it be !). 

3. Thou hast proved mine heart ; thou hast visited me in 
the night ; thou hast tried me, and shalt find nothing : I 
am purposed that my mouth shall not transgress. 

"Proved" as metals are proved and purified in the furnace.- 

"Hast visited me in the night" — when, secluded from social in- 
fluence, and left to his own thought, man is himself; thinking 



PSALM XVII. 



67 



evil if so inclined, but good and good only if a truly honest man. 

"Thou hast tried me" as with tire, for so the original implies, 

and shalt find no dross, no deceit. The last clause has been 

construed variously: 'iMy mouth shall not exceed my thought," 
(Alexander); "My thoughts transgress not my command, i: <?., do 
not swerve from the law of God and of virtue which I have im- 
posed on myself" (Gesenius); "My thinking did not go beyond 
my mouth" (Fuerst) ; "Thou shalt not find me plotting evil; my 
mouth shall not transgress" (Maurer); "No iniquity shall be 
found in me; my mouth shall not speak the words of men" 
(Septuagint and Vulgate) — which connect this verse with the first 
clause of the verse following. The reader will notice that the 
general sentiment remains substantially the same through all 
these slight diversities. Several circumstances combine to occa- 
sion these diversities, e. g., that the word translated, "am pur- 
posed" may be used either in a good sense or a bad; either for 
the thoughtful, solemn purpose of good, or for the cunning, . ma- 
licious purpose of evil ; also that the word for transgress may 
stand with or without an object — may be either transitive or in- 
transitive. Then again, the Masorites have complicated the diffi- 
culties of the passage by indicating that in their opinion the word 
for "purposed " is not a verb in the preter, but a noun or an infini- 
tive. But for this opinion of theirs, the. construction given in our 
English version would, I judge, Jiave been readily adopted. I in- 
cline to adopt it notwithstanding, for even taking this contested 
word as an infinitive or a noun we may translate, "According to 
my earnest purpose, my mouth shall not transgress." 

4. Concerning the works of men, by the word of thy 
lips I have kept me from the paths of the destroyer. 

"Concerning the works of men" is said of the evil doings of 
bad men. From these the Psalmist kept himself by carefully 
observing the words of the Lord, the words that had fallen from 
his lips. "Paths of the destroyer" are the ways of life pur- 
sued by men of violence and blood. Once and again David 
might have taken the life of Saul by violence, but he restrained 
himself, saying, "I must not lift up my hand against the Lord's 
anointed." The word of Jehovah's lips had said, "Vengeance is 
mine" — and these words kept him from violence, the usual way 
of bad men. See 1 Sam. 26: 8-11, 23 and 24: 3-19 and Deut. 
32: 35. 

5. Hold up my goings in thy paths, that my footsteps slip 
not. 

6. I have called upon thee, for thou wilt hear me, O 
God: incline thine ear unto me, and hear my speech. 

7. Show thy marvelous loving-kindness, O thou that 
savest by thy right hand them which put their trust in thee 
from those that rise up against them. 



68 



PSALM XVII. 



Such a temptation to violence as that which had almost en- 
snared David to take the life of Saul suggested the need of such 
prayer as this, that God would continually uphold him and make 
him strong in the right way. " Show thy marvelous loving- 
kindness" is more precisely, show thy loving-kindness to be mar- 
velous — make the manifestations of it to be glorious in the case 

of thy servant. Beautiful indeed is the form of this address to 

the Hearer of prayer — " 0 thou that savest by thy right hand all 
who trust in thee from their uprising foes." 

8. Keep me as the apple of the eye ; hide me under the 
shadow of thy wings, 

• 9. From the Avicked that oppress me, from my deadly 
enemies, ivho compass me about. 

The original is fine: ''Keep me as the little man, the daughter 
of the eye," i. e. } the pupil of the eye in which you may see the 
little man — the very diminutive image of yourself, which, regard- 
less of gender, the Hebrews spake of also as "the daughter of the 
eye." Both God's care in the construction of the eye, and the in- 
stinct of man under a consciousness of its priceless value, conspire 
to the keeping of the eye above all other keeping, thus making it 
an admirable illustration of the care with which we fitly pray God 

to keep us from all sin and harm. " Hide me under the shadow 

of thy wings," looks toward the mother birds who shield their 
young under their outspread wings, close to their warm bosom. 
Both these figures come naturally from those charming words of 
Moses (Deut. 32: 10, 11): "He found him" [the Lord found 
Israel] " in a desert land and in the waste, howling wilderness : 
he led him about, he instructed him, he kept him as the apple of his 
eye. As an eagle stirreth up her nest ; fluttereth over her young ; 
spreadeth abroad her wings, taketh them, beareth them on her 
wings; so the Lord alone did lead him," etc. 

10. They are inclosed in their own fat ; with their mouth 
they speak proudly. 

The HebreAvs associate excessive fatness [obesity] with the dull- 
est moral perceptions, and a hard, stubborn, and proud heart. 
Moses leads in this thought (Deut. 32: 10); "Jeshurun [the up- 
right one] waxed fat and kicked" [with allusion to well fed 
animals]. Job says (15 : 25-27) of the man who " strengtheneth 
himself against the Almighty, running upon the thick bosses of his 
buckler" — " Because he covereth his face with his fatness and 
maketh collops of fat on his flanks " — as if this excessive fatness 
produced the most defiant hardihood against God. In Ps. 73 : 7-9, 
we have this portrait.: "Their eyes stand out with fatness: they 
are corrupt; they speak loftily. They set their mouth against the 
heavens," etc., and Ps. 119 : 70: "Their heart is as fat as grease; 
but I [all unlike them] delight in thy law." Isaiah (6: 10) has 
the same conception. 



PSALM XVII. 



69 



11. They have now compassed us in our steps : they have 
set their eyes bowing down to the earth ; 

12. Like as a lion that is greedy of his prey, and as it 
were a young lion lurking in secret places. 

"They have set their eyes bowing down to the earth," connected 
closely with " encompassing the steps of the righteous," supposes 
them to follow their track with sharp eye and head inclined for- 
ward, chasing them down ; or as the lion lying in wait and impa- 
tient for the moment to spring upon his victim. 

13. Arise, O Lord, disappoint him, cast him dow T n : 
deliver my soul from the wicked, which is thy sword : 

14. From men ivhich are thy hand, O Lord, from men 
of the world, which have their portion in this life, and whose 
belly thou fillest with thy hid treasure: they are full of 
children, and leave the rest of their substance to their babes. 

" Disappoint," should rather be intercept ; or more precisely, rush 
in before him, i. e., between me and my deadly foe ; and break him 

down; lay him low at my feet. In the last clause, the Hebrew 

leaves us to decide by the context and the nature of the case be- 
tween these two constructions — that of our English text, and that 
of the English margin; that is, between placing "sword" in ap- 
position to the wicked ; or putting a preposition before it — by thy 
sword; in the former case with the idea that God used those 
wicked men as his instrument in scourging David; in the latter, he 
prays to God: Draw thy sword against my foes to cut them off. 
The Hebrew will bear either construction and therefore does not 
decide this point. The latter construction seems to me much more 
in harmony with the course of thought here than the former. 
While it is true that God sometimes uses the wicked as his instru- 
ment to scourge good men erring, the scope of this Psalm does not 
intimate the presence of this truth in the writer's mind. He does 
not think of these wicked men as doing God's work, but rather as 
doing their own; nor of himself as suffering under God's righteous 
visitation through the hands of ungodly men, but as suffering un- 
justly from the causeless malice of the wicked. I therefore prefer 

to read: "Deliver my soul from the wicked by thy sword." 

The same considerations should determine the construction in v. 
14, thus : " Deliver my soul from men by thy hand, 0 Lord, yea, 
from men — from the world — (where we have the same preposition 
before "world" as before "men"), i. e., from worldly men as 
opposed to the godly, who are also further described as having their 
portion in this life, prospered in wordly good, blessed to their 
heart's desire with children and with wealth to leave to them when 
they die. 

15. As for me, I will behold thy face in righteousness : I 
shall be satisfied, when I awake, with thy likeness. 

4 



70 



PSALM XVII. 



The Hebrew makes the antithesis between the writer and his 
rich and powerful enemies, very strong: I, for my part, have a far 
different lot from theirs. My treasures are not of the earth, con- 
sist not in being satisfied with children and with wealth enough 
to enjoy with them while I live and to leave for them at my 
death : but it shall suffice for me to behold thy face in purity and 
integrity so as to ensure thy favor ; it shall be enough for me to 
have the blissful satisfaction of awaking from the sleep of death 
in thine own blessed image ! 

On this passage the great question of interpretation is whether 
David thinks of the enjoyment of God's favor here in this world, 
or in the world to come ; whether this beholding the face of God is 
only those manifestations of his favor which pertain to earth, or 
those which pertain to heaven : also whether the awaking is from 
natural sleep only, each morning; or from the sleep of death in 
the resurrection of the just; and whether "in thy likeness" 
means "with thine appearance," as Dr. Alexander puts it. or in 
thy perfect moral image in the sense of the Apostle John ; " We 
shall be like him for we shall see him as he is" (1 John 3: 2). 

I have already indicated my preference for the construction 
which refers this passage to the future life. In support of it I 
urge, (1) That the words themselves not only admit but with con- 
siderable force demand this construction. "Beholding the face 
of God" will not have its legitimate meaning filled out until we 
reach heaven. 'Awaking" is painfully meager and inept if ap- 
plied to rising from one's nightly sleep, but is not only pertinent 
but sublimely glorious when said of the resurrection from the 
grave. " With thy likeness " a Hebrew word which legitimately 
means form, image, as of what is shaped, fashioned, has no proper 
sense if applied to each morning's rising from sleep, but is preg- 
nant with grand significance as spoken of the resurrection body 
clothed upon with immortality. 1 also urge, (2) That the con- 
text — the relation of thought in this antithesis between David and 
his wicked persecutors, demands the reference of his words to the 
future life. They are " men of this world ; " he of another: " they 
have their portion in this life; " he in the next: they are satisfied 
with children ; he, with his final awaking in the divine image : 
they make out a sort of immortality by leaving their wealth to 
their sons and to their sons' sons after them; but David's immor- 
tality is simply that of the just— the glorious inheritance laid up 

for God's children. These two comprehensive considerations 

constitute in my view the legitimate arguments by which the main 
question must be determined. I submit to the reader whether 

they are not decisive. That a large number of German critics, 

assuming that David knew nothing about the resurrection or the 
future blessed life, should see here only a man enjoying a con- 
sciousness of personal integrity and a sense of God's approbation, 
awaking from sleep each morning with these views of himself and 
of God, refreshed by the grateful invigoration of repose, does not 



PSALM XVIII. 



71 



greatly surprise me. But that Dr. Alexander, a very judicious 
commentator who almost never misses the Christian sense of God's 
word, should endorse those views, is at once surprising and sad. 
His words are : "A third interpretation puts a still higher sense 
upon the phrase as referring to the act of awaking from the sleep 
of death. But this excludes too much from view the enjoyment 
of God's favor and protection even here, which is the burden of 
the whole prayer. If the hope of future blessedness had been 

enough, the previous petitions would have been superfluous." 

But it might be asked, Is it superfluous for Christians to pray for 
protection of life, for the measure of earthly good which it may 
please God to grant, because they deeply feel that " the hope of 
future blessedness is enough?" David was bearing the responsi- 
bilities of a throne and of a great people, yea, of God's earthly 
kingdom: might he not pray that God would save him from his 
powerful foes and gird him for his earthly work, and also with all 
this, feel most fully that his supreme and only satisfying joys are 
in the promised resurrection of the just and in that perfect image 
of his Maker in which he should one day rise to a glorious im- 
mortality ? 

W^Oo 

PSALM. XVIII. 

This remarkable Psalm indicates not only its author but its 
object — David, writing after the Lord had delivered him from all 
his enemies and especially from Saul — writing to recount the 
dangers through which the Lord had borne him in safety, declar- 
ing his love to his gracious Protector, delightfully reiterating the 
thought that God's own hand and this alone had wrought for him 
these signal deliverances and made him triumphant over all his 
foes. The last verse alludes definitely to his anointed Son — the 
Great Messiah — destined of God to be his successor on an eter- 
nal throne according to the promise in 2 Sam. 7 — a fact which 
seems to locate the writing of this Psalm at a point subsequent to 
that prophetic announcement to him, and to show that David saw 
in the deliverances achieved for himself a first installment of God's 
promised deliverances for his Zion through the Great Redeemer. 
This song, with only slight variations, appears in the histori- 
cal book (2 Sam. 22). 

To the chief Musician, A Psalm of David, the servant of the Lord, who 
spake unto the Lord the words of this song in the day that the Lord 
delivered him from the hand of all his enemies, and from the hand 
of Saul : And he said, 

1. I will love thee, O Lord, my strength. 

2. The Lord, is my rock, and my fortress, and my de- 
liverer ; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust ; my 
buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower. 



72 



PSALM XVIII. 



Xothing can surpass the pertinence, simplicity, and beauty of 
this first utterance : " I will love thee, 0 Lord, my strength." My 
grateful heart shall give thee its purest love in the overflowing of 
its warmest gratitude for thy saving mercy to me through many 
long years of peril. The reader will also notice the accumula- 
tion of oriental and ancient terms to express the one idea that 

God and God only had saved him. Here are two Hebrew words 

meaning rock, the second (in the middle of v. 2) being trans- 
lated in our version, " my strength." "Fortress," u high tower," 
''horn of salvation," "buckler," "deliverer," all combine to show 
how strongly David felt the truth he uttered and how his mind 
labored to give it full expression. 

3. I will call upon the LoPwD, tvho is worthy to be praised : 
so shall I be saved from mine enemies. 

The use of the future tense in this Psalm should be particularly 
noted as a point of some difficulty, yet of real interest. I incline 
somewhat strongly to this construction, viz. : that in these future 
verbs (as here "1 will call ") the writer throws himself back in 
thought into the midst of those scenes to reproduce the feelings of 
those hours and testify to his words and thoughts then, assuming 
doubtless that he thinks and feels essentially so still. The verses 
before us would take this turn : In those scenes of peril I said, " I 
will call upon the Lord, evermore to be praised ; and I shall be 
saved from all my enemies." I thought and felt so then; I think 
and feel so now. 

4. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the floods 
of ungodly men made me afraid. 

5. The sorrows of hell compassed me about: the snares 
of death prevented me. 

The word "sorrows" should be read bands or cords, meaning, 
I was as one bound for death, like an ox bound for the slaughter. 
This is the usual and well established sense of the original word. 
It is moreover strongly implied in both the verbs used with it, 
(that in v. 4 and that in v. 5, which are unlike in Hebrew, though 
both are translated "compassed" in our version). "Bands com- 
passed me," were drawn firmly round me. These Hebrew verbs 
could scarcely be used of pains, sorrows. That pangs should 
seize upon one is a Hebrew conception; but it is not Hebrew 
usage that pangs become cords and ropes to gird a prisoner round 

and hold him fast. In harmony with this is the last clause of 

v. 5 : Snares, deadly, fatal gins, were immediately before me, in 
my very path, so that it seemed I could not take another step 
without being caught in their grasp. The old sense of the word 
"prevent" is precisely this; they came in directly before me; 
they lay under my very feet. In v. 5, "hell" [Sheol] is essen- 
tially synonymous with "death" in the parallel clause in v. 4. 
The sense in both words is that he seemed to himself bound and 



PSALM XVIII. 



73 



drawn unto death, a captive in the power of Death personified, on 
the point of being dragged to his bloody altar to be immolated 
there. The meaning is not at all that he had an awful foretaste 
or even fear of the pains of the future hell, thought of as the 

final doom of the wicked. In the clause, "Floods of ungodly 

men," etc., the abstract, wickedness, or more precisely, worthless- 
ness, would be more exactly the sense of the Hebrew word. He 
thinks of human depravity as a torrent rushing upon him to 
affright his soul and threaten his certain destruction. 

6. In my distress I called upon the Lord, and cried 
unto my . God : he heard my voice out of his temple, and 
my cry came before him, even into his ears. 

Every verb in this verse is in the future tense, to be con- 
structed as said above on v. 3. In my straitness [I said] I will 
call upon the Lord and to my God will I lift up my cry ; he will 
hear my voice, etc. So I felt then ; so I said; so I did. It is re- 
freshing now to remember how my agonized heart cried out after 
God, and how my faith and God's open ear and strong hand bore 

me safely through. That he thinks of God as " hearing out of 

his temple " is due to that remarkable feature in the divine ar- 
rangement with Israel whereby he made the most holy place, 
whether in the tabernacle or temple, his visible abode, and di- 
rected his people to pray toward this earthly dwelling-place of his. 
In dedicating the temple he had built, Solomon continually speaks 
of "praying toward this house" (1 Kings 8: 29, 30, etc). On the 
same principle of condescending accommodation to the infancy 
of the most advanced human thought, God encourages his people 
to speak of their cry as " coming up before him even into his 
ear." It gives us a life-like impression of One who tenderly 
bends to the voice of our cry and opens the ear to every word of 
humble prayer. 

7. Then the earth shook and trembled ; the foundations 
also of the hills moved and were shaken, because he was 
wroth. 

8. There went up a smoke out of his nostrils, and lire 
out of his mouth devoured : coals were kindled by it. 

God hears the cry of his suffering, imperiled servant, and 
rouses himself to his rescue. Indignant that wicked men should 
set upon him thus to distress and even destroy him, he gives ex- 
pression to this hot indignation. David gives the freest play to 
his poetic genius, or shall we rather say, his enkindled soul pours 
forth its poetic fire to do justice if he can to the manifestations 
of God's righteous judgment upon his enemies. "Then the earth 
did shake and quake " (all nature in sympathy with its great 
Maker) ; the very foundations of the hills rocked under his earth- 
quake tread, for God was aroused to fierce indignation. In v. 

8, " there went up a smoke," etc. ; it is supposable that the poet's 



74 



PSALM XVIII. 



imagination conceives of the convulsions of nature as giving best 
expression to the emotions of its Author, and at this point sees the 
open volcano emitting columns of heavy smoke and sheets of 
lurid flame. It is God in his awful majesty ! So before the sweep 
of God's righteous providence Saul was hurried on to a fearful 
death, and Absalom also. David lived to see every one of his 

prominent enemies slain. In the Hebrew which stands for the 

clause, " The earth shook and trembled," the reader would notice 
that singular assonance which I have sought to reproduce in the 
words, Then the earth did shake and quake. It is more than 
probable that the words David used suggested by their very sound 
the rush and crash of nature's elements in this august crisis. 

9. He bowed the heavens also, and came down : and 
darkness was under his feet. 

10. And he rode upon a cherub, and did fly : yea, he 
did fly upon the wiugs of the wind. 

It is not enough that God should speak through nature, giving 
it a thousand voices of earthquake and of storm to utter forth his 
indignation. He must needs come down himself to the rescue of 
his accepted suppliant. So we see here : " He bowed the 
heavens;" his lofty dwelling-place and glorious throne seemed 
themselves to come down toward the earth; God came near. 
Darkness gathered about his sacred feet. "He rode upon a 
cherub " (the winged angel figures of the most holy place furnish 
the poetic conception). He flew on wings of wind. Rapidity and 
majesty blend in the grandeur and power of this scene. 

11. He made darkness his secret place ; his pavilion 
round about him were dark waters and thick clouds of the 
skies. 

12. At the brightness that was before him his thick 
clouds passed, hail stones and coals of fire. 

Darkness and storm are in the ascendant here. " Dark waters," 
are not waters resting on the earth of a dark black color, but are 
rather clouds made black, dark, and heavy, by being fully charged 

with water. V. 12 might be read, From the brightness before 

him (flashes of lightning) his heavy clouds swept on with hail and 
lightning. Coals of fire in this connection can be none other than 
the sheets of lightning out of these awful storm-clouds. 

13. The Lord also thundered in tlie heavens, and the 
Highest gave his voice ; hail stoiies and coals of fire. 

14. Yea, he sent out his arrows, and scattered them ; 
and he shot out lightnings, and discomfited them. 

The thnnder-storm stands out here in every word. The voice 
of God here as throughout Ps. 29 is simply thunder. "Coals of 
fire " are only lightnings. Changing the figure yet again, these 



PSALM XVIII. 



75 



are God's arrows with which he discomfits his foes. The word 
"them" after the verbs "scattered" and "discomfited" represents 
his enemies for whose destruction he bowed the heavens and came 
down. 

15. Then the channels of waters were seen, and the 
foundations of the world were discovered at thy rebuke, 
O Lord, at the blast of the breath of thy nostrils. 

The conception seems to be that the solid globe is convulsed 
and even uptorn so that the water-courses of the underground 
springs and rivers are brought to view, and the very foundations 
of the mountains are laid bare by this rebuke of the Almighty — 

this blast of the breath of his indignation. The word rendered 

"nostrils" often and probably here has the sense of indignation, 
as also in v. 8. 

16. He sent from above, he took nie, he drew me out of 
many w r aters. 

All the Hebrew verbs in this verse and the next are in the future 
tense, for which I see no other explanation so satisfactory as that 
above given, viz. : that the poet throws himself back into the midst 
of those scenes and gives us the very thoughts and feelings of his 
soul then and there ; I said, " he will send forth his hand and take 

me." The Hebrew verb "drew" carries us back to the case of 

Moses whom his mother drew out of the waters of the Nile, a 
saved boy, and therefore gave him this name, Drew. The name 
Moses is from the verb used both here and there for drawing one 
out of the water, meaning the drawn-out boy. Thus David compares 
himself with Moses, in a similar way drawn out of the great deep 
waters of his perils from bloody enemies. 

17. He delivered me from my strong enemy, and from 
them which hated me : for they were too strong for me. 

18. They prevented me in the day of my calamity : but 
the Lord was my stay. 

19. He brought me forth also into a large place; he 
delivered me, because he delighted in me. 

The same thought is expanded. "Prevented me," as above; 
they planted themselves immediately before me ; they environed 
my steps. "Into a large place" as opposed to a straitened, shut- 
up place, where, hedged in on every side, he could not escape, but 
must fall an easy prey to his pursuers. In those Oriental countries 
where so commonly men in peril sought safety only in flight, this 
figure would be at once plain ana forcible. A mounted Arab or a 
swift-footed mountaineer asked only a fair field for a race, and 
distance became his safety. Cornered in the fastnesses of the hills, 

either of them would be an easy prey. The last clause of v._ 19 

advances to a new thought upon which he proceeds to enlarge, viz. : 
that God delivered him because he approved of his life and spirit, 



76 



PSALM XVIII. 



and had chosen him therefore, a "man after his own heart" to 
ascend the throne of Israel, and hence after a sufficient baptism 
of suffering and trial, after an adequate discipline to his faith and 
patience and resignation to God's will, he seats him securely on 
that throne. 

20. The Lord rewarded me according to my righteous- 
ness ; according to the cleanness of my hands hath he rec- 
ompensed me. 

21. For I have kept the ways of the Lord, and have 
not wickedly departed from my God. 

22. For all his judgments were before me, and I did 
not put away his statutes from me. 

23. I was also upright before him, and I kept myself 
from mine iniquity. 

24. Therefore hath the Lord recompensed me according 
to my righteousness, according to the cleanness of my hands 
in his eyesight. 

How shall we understand these assertions as to personal right- 
eousness ? Does David mean to affirm of himself sinless perfection 
unqualifiedly, and to affirm it of the entire period of his religious 
life; or shall we restrict his words to the great point at issue as 

between himself and his political enemies ? A question of this 

sort should not be decided upon any other considerations save the 
legitimate demands of the context and the nature of the case. 
Obviously these statements are made here to show why the Lord 
interposed for his help. It suffices therefore to account for these 
protestations of innocence and integrity, to understand him as re- 
ferring only to his conduct in relation to his enemies, of whom we 
may well take king Saul as a specimen case. David did not strike 
for the throne of Israel of his own motion, but only because God 
called him. When thus called he did not ambitiously hasten and 
force his way to the throne, but quietly waited the slow movements 
of God's providence. When his life was imperiled and his foot- 
steps tracked and hunted down from Dan to Beersheba, he never 
retaliated. When he might have done 00, he withheld his hand, 
never striking at Saul's life, nor even touching a hair of his head — 
in all which he was deeply conscious of having sought to please 
God and of having been essentially upright before him. In those 
great points at issue he had been right and Saul wrong. This ob- 
viously is what he meant to say in these verses, and apparently all 
he meant to say. The scope of thffe Psalm demands no broader and 
no other application of his words than this. Hence I conclude 
that this is their true construction. The question whether at this 
writing David had lived a sinless life and how long, if at all, does 
not come in here appropriately, and finds no evidence here bearing 
toward its legitimate answer. 



PSALM XVIII. 



77 



25. With the merciful thou wilfc show thyself merciful ; 
with an upright man thou wilt show thyself upright ; 

26. With the pure thou wilt show thyself pure ; and 
with the froward thou wilt show thyself froward. 

The doctrine of these verses is that God deals with men accord- 
ing to their character and deserts. The only difficult clause is the 
last, "With the froward thou wilt show thyself froward." "Fro- 
ward " means perverse, and usually in the bad moral sense. Must 
we then say that God deals perversely, subverting moral rectitude, 
with the perverse sinner ? By no means. Every element in his 
nature forbids. But does not this language affirm precisely this ? 
Not at all. The language is shaped in close correspondence with 
the three clauses immediately preceding. It follows those three 
clauses in its form perfectly ; this accounts for the application of the 
word " froward " to God. The meaning is that if men pursue a tortu- 
ous, crooked course toward God, perpetually swerving from the 
straight line of moral rectitude, he can shift his course to meet and 
baffle them at every point. He can make his course as crooked 
physically as they do theirs morally. They can never make so tortu- 
ous a path morally that God can not follow them up in the course 
of his physical visitations of judgment and bring on them a righteous 
retribution. This perfect retribution from God is precisely the thing 
affirmed throughout these verses. The Psalmist meant to say that 
the wicked never can be too cunning, too artful, to be detected 
and scourged, punished, by the all-knowing and all-powerful God. 

27. For thou wilt save the afflicted people; but wilt 
bring down high looks. 

28. For thou wilt light my candle: the Lord my God 
will enlighten my darkness. 

29. For by thee I have run through a troop ; and by my 
God have I leaped over a wall. 

That God will save the afflicted and abase the proud, are truths 
often reiterated in these Psalms, yet always precious. David felt 
them to be so because they had touched his personal experi- 
ence. "Light my candle," "illumine my darkness," are words 

full of precious significance. Blessed are they whose life, like 

David's, is full of it! David had the physical as well as the 

moral qualities of a great warrior. Remarkably he sees God's 
hand in the gift of these qualities. By Thee have I rushed through 
whole troops of foes; By my God have I over-leaped walls— 
the high walls of strong cities. Thus the scope of this Psalm 
goes beyond mere protection — David upon the defensive and God 
warding off violent assaults ; for here David takes the offensive 
and becomes mighty through God to rush upon the serried hosts 
of his enemies, or to scale the walls of their strong cities. 

30. As for God, his way is perfect: the word of the 



78 



PSALM XVIII. 



Lord is tried: he is a buckler to all those that trust iu 
him. 

31. For who is God save the Lord ? or who is a rock save 
our God? 

God's ways with his true servants are u perfect" in the sense of 
meeting all their emergencies as in this context, both for defense 
and offense against enemies, either or both as the case may 

require. "The word of the Lord" seems here to be his word 

of promise, which is proved, David would say, in my experience. 
I came to him in my distress and sought his help and pled his 

promise, never in vain ! The two most common names of God 

are used here, not at random, but with exquisite pertinence. 
" Who is Elohim " — the Almighty God — " save Jehovah " — the ever 
faithful One whose word of promise 1 have tried and proved; "or 
who is a Bock" — of all sustaining strength — "save our Elohim" — 
the Mighty One ? 

32. It is God that girdeth me with strength, and makcth 
my way perfect. 

33. He maketh my feet like hind's feet, and setteth me 
upon my high places. 

34. He teacheth my hands to war, so that a bow of steel 
is broken by mine arms. 

Feet swift as the hind's enabled David, fleeing before Saul, to 
make his escape with comparative ease. "Set upon his high 
places," he was up beyond the reach of the weapons of ancient 

warfare. "Boav of steel "—better of brass, since the word is 

most often so used, and we know that brass was in use for bows 
long before steel was, if indeed steel was ever in such use. The 
word for "broken" probably means to be sprung or bent, in 
readiness for throwing its arrow. 

35. Thou hast also given me the shield of thy salvation : 
and thy right hand hath holden me up, and thy gentleness 
hath made me great. 

In the clause, "Thy gentleness hath made me great," "gentle- 
ness " seems not quite the word. The original, as applied to men, 
means usually humility, lowliness ; and as used of God, condescen- 
sion, said, it would seem, with special reference to God's bending 
low to his prayer and coming down low, i. e., from the high 
heavens above, in his glorious help. The Hebrew verb from which 
this noun comes means both to answer and to be lovily — ideas which 
naturally blend, for all answering implies more or less inclination 
toward, but especially is this true of God's answering to his lowly 
creature, man. 

36. Thou hast enlarged my steps under me, that my feet 
did not slip. 



rSALM XVIII. 



79 



37. I have pursued mine enemies, and overtaken them: 
neither did I turn again till they were consumed. 

38. I have wounded them that they were not able to rise : 
they are fallen under my feet. 

To "enlarge one's steps" is to give him ample standing and a 

strong position. It should not be forgotten that David fought 

his battles not for himself or for any selfish object, but as the 
Lord's consecrated servant. Hence such words as these have a 
legitimate place in this sacred, grateful song. Otherwise they 
would be utterly out of place here. 

39. For thou hast girded me with strength unto the bat- 
tle : thou hast subdued under me those that rose up against 
me. 

40. Thou hast also given me the necks of mine enemies ; 
that I might destroy them that hate me. 

To "give to David the necks of his enemies" is, in the expres- 
sive phrase of the Hebrew, to give them to him by the neck, or 
neck-wise — to place their necks in his power. 

41. They cried, but there tvas none to save them: even 
unto the Lord, but he answered them not. 

In their distress they cried to their own God, but in vain; or if to 
the real Jehovah, still he was no God of theirs — was not the God they 
intelligently or sincerely worshiped. The story of Jonah shows 
that the uninstructed heathen may cry in their distress to the god 
of the storm, or to the god who wields the destinies of battle ; 
and perhaps this is what David intended to say. 

42. Then did I beat them small as the dust before the 
wind : I did cast them out as the dirt in the streets. 

This portion of the Psalm contemplates the wars of David 
against the various heathen nations contiguous, from whom under 
the Judges and Saul the nation had often suffered severely — 
Philistia, Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Syria. The figure in this 
verse indicates the thoroughness, not to say severity, with which 
he executed his high commission against them. The short-com- 
ing of Saul (1 Sam. 15:) sent of God to destroy Amalek, was 
before his eyes as a warning. 

43. Thou hast delivered me from the strivings of the peo- 
ple ; and thou hast made me the head of the heathen : a 
people whom I have not known shall serve me. 

44. As soon as they hear of me, they shall obey me : the 
strangers shall submit themselves unto me. 

45. The strangers shall fade away, and be afraid out of 
their close places. 



80 



PSALM XVIII. 



"Strivings of the people," meaning by "people" the Gentile 
and hostile nations encircling Israel, over all whom the Lord 

made David victorious. The word rendered, "Shall submit 

themselves unto me," implies that they lie to him to gain his favor, 
perhaps after the manner of the Gibeonites (Josh. 9), but cer- 
tainly implying great fear of his power. " Be afraid oat of their 

close places" is precisely — They come forth with fear from their 
hiding-places, assured of their insecurity there and having no 
hope but in complete, not to say abject, submission. 

46. The Lord liveth ; and blessed be my Rock ; and let 
the God of my salvation be exalted. 

47. It is God that avengeth me, and subdueth the people 
under me. 

48. He delivereth me from mine enemies : yea, thou liftest 
me up above those that rise up against me : thou hast de- 
livered me from the violent man. 

" The Lord liveth " can not be taken as a form of the solemn 
oath, as these words are used in some connections, nor as a prayer 
that God may live, which in its strict sense is entirely uncalled 
for; but as a fact in which his obedient people may forever exult. 
David would say: It is my supreme joy that my Jehovah liveth 
forever and ever : blessed be He who is the Eock of my salva- 
tion. "It is God who giveth me revenges," i. e., who avenges 

my cause, and for my sincere devotion to him makes me victorious 
over my foes. But David recognizes the cause for which he lived 
and for which he waged his wars as rather God's than his own — 
i. e., as God's before it was his, and as his only because it was 
God's and himself God's servant. Hence his joy in God who had 
interposed for his own purposes and for his own glory. 

49. Therefore will I give thanks unto thee, O Lord, 
among the heathen, and sing praises unto thy name. 

The remarkable thing here is that David would send the voice of 
his thanksgiving to God forth abroad among the heathen nations. 
It was no part of his faith that the true religion was for Hebrews 
only. It was a joy to his large heart to make known God's won- 
derful works and his exalted nature to the nations of the wide 
earth, all along down the coming ages. It is interesting to note 
that Paul (Rom. 15:9) caught the spirit of this passage and ap- 
plied it to the conversion of the Gentiles. 

50. Great deliverance giveth he to his king ; and showetli 
mercy to his anointed, to David, and to his seed for ever- 
more. 

"To his king" — to me only because I am his anointed king, 
called by his prophet to serve him in this capacity ; saved from all 
my enemies and finally made secure and triumphant on his throne 



PSALM XIX. 



81 



to do his work in Israel. "Mercy to his anointed" might in 

itself not improperly be extended to apply to every anointed king 
on the throne of Israel, but the explanatory clause which follows 
demands this large application, yet with very special reference to 
his greater Son, the one supreme Messiah. In particular the 
eternal duration here contemplated — " for evermore ' — can be fitly 
applied only to the great Messiah. Hence it is plain that in the 
subjugation of his national enemies, in their ready subjection to 
his scepter, and in the retribution which God brought upon his 
persistent enemies, David thought of himself as the great re- 
presentative of the true Messiah. His thought was : Such deliv- 
erances will the mighty God work for his then future king; such 
achievements the gospel forces of the coming age are destined to 
effect. The Psalm has an element of prophecy running through 
it but developing itself with special clearness, in these closing 
verses. Well might this element enkindle David's songs and give 
fresh impulse to his praises of God among all the heathen. And 
let every Christian reader say, Amen ! 

PSALM XIX. 

This Psalm is in two parts: in the first (v. 1-6) the visible 
heavens come before us as witnesses for God: in the second (v. 
7-14) God's written law is presented, both in its qualities and in its 
moral effects. Comprehensively we might say here is, first, nature ; 
secondly, revelation. Both are thought of as books from God ; both 
as proclaiming his character, witnessing to his glorious majesty 
and his matchless wisdom and beneficence. The Psalm has been 
admired in all ages for its exquisite poetry, its comprehensive and 
pertinent thought; and for its sublime moral lessons. It gives us 
new views of the breadth and comprehensiveness of David's mind, 
and of his noble appreciation of the works of God in both these 
great fields of his revelation to mortals. 

1. The heavens declare the glory of God ; and the firma- 
ment slioweth his handiwork. 

The "heavens" are here the lower visible heavens with special 
reference to the heavenly bodies (so called); and the "firmament" 
is no other than the great concave sky, called the "firmament" 
because supposed to be solid matter, of firm, concave surface, in 
which the stars were fixed and along the face of which the sun 
and the moon swept over their respective pathways to fulfill their 

destined mission. A more precise rendering of the Hebrew 

heightens the impression : " The heavens are telling the glory of 
God; the firmament is setting before us the work of his hands" — 
constantly, now and evermore, with no cessation, no intermis- 
sion. " Telling " as from a book, a written narrative, as the He- 



82 



PSALM XIX. 



brew word indicates. "Handiwork" is not his easily made 

work, but simply the work of his hands. "The glory of God " 

is no other than the glorious qualities of his character — his wis- 
dom, power, and beneficence. Every thing in this vast field of 
nature above our heads is magnificent and beautiful, grand in its 
order and method, vast in its proportions, and, above all, benefi- 
cent in its provisions of light and heat for the good of man and 

of all sentient beings. Let it also be noted that the names of 

the Deity used here are not taken up at random, but are wisely 
chosen. " El," the Mighty One, the Great Creator and Euler of 
all, is he whose glory the heavens are telling. It is as such a 
glorious Creator and disposer of all the worlds in space that the 
heavens are forever proclaiming his glory. On the other hand, 
the giver of the law (vs. 7-14) is "Jehovah," the God of the 
Covenant, the God of the promises, the God who first revealed the 
significance of this name, "Jehovah," to Moses and to Israel (Ex. 
6: 3 and 3: 11-15), in calling his people forth from Egypt and 
giving them then his moral law together with statutes and judg- 
ments under which they might walk in communion with him as 
their revealed Lord and Father. 

2. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night 
showeth knowledge. 

"Day to clay will pour out speech; night to night will set forth 
knowledge" — the future tense indicating that this both is and will 
be their perpetual function. "Day unto day" means that each 
day bears its witness in perpetual succession, as if one testified in 
harmony with another and each in harmony with all. Each 
day and each night come forward as witnesses to the same glory 
of their Maker, each true to its mission of service, each prompt 
to its appointed work in perfect method, with unvarying order, in 
military precision. The "speech" which the day uttered forth is 
no other than this witnessing testimony to the glory of the Great 
Maker of all. The "knowledge" which each night reveals to 
man is knowledge concerning the mighty God who made the count- 
less worlds of the evening sky. 

3. Tliere is no speech nor language, ivhere their voice is 
not heard. 

4. Their line is gone out through all the earth, and their 
words to the end of the world. 

As if conscious that his bold poetic conception of the heavens 
as a book and of speech uttered by one day after another might 
need some qualification, he checks himself here for explanation. 
Not real speech; no actual words; no articulate voice is heard; 
and yet their line, their musical utterance, the ring of their sweet 
melody goes forth through all the earth, and their poetic words to 
the ends of the world. The English version obscures the sense by 
introducing the words, "there is" and "where." The true sense 



PSALM XIX. 



83 



appears when we simply translate the words given in the Hebrew 
as above. "No speech; no words; no [literal] voice of theirs is 

heard." In v. 4, "their line" is taken by some to mean their 

measuring line, in the sense, the range or scope of their domain 
fills the wide world; but the context and the parallel term, 
"words," concur to justify the sense — their melody, the ring or 

twang of their melodious utterance. Remarkably the Hebrew 

term for "words" in the last clause of v. 4, is used only in 
poetry — their words, poetically conceived, sound forth to the ends 
of the world. The entire passage is full of exquisite beauty. 

5. In them hatli he set a tabernacle for the sun, which 
is as a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, and re- 
joiceth as a strong man to run a race. 

6. His going forth is from the end of the heaven, and 
his circuit unto the ends of it: and there is nothing hid 
from the heat thereof. 

In these heavens God hath pitched a tent for the sun — a state- 
ment which is the more remarkable because, according to the as- 
tronomical conceptions of that age, this tent was not located in 
the visible heavens, but below the horizon, under the earth, the 
sun dropping into it at his setting, and coming forth from it fresh 
and lovely as a bridegroom from his chamber ; vigorous as a strong 
man trained for the race. Then he sweeps athwart the heavens 
from the distant East to the farthest West, and nothing can 
escape the heat of his beams. Vegetation starts into fresh life at 
his touch; all living things and creatures rejoice in his light and 
heat. His ministries of good pervade the wide earth from the end 
of heaven, the eastern horizon, to the uttermost end of it on the 

face of the western sky. These conceptions of the heavenly 

bodies are thoroughly poetical, i. e., such as the imagination 
paints, and they follow the current astronomical thought and 
speech of that age. It is their charm and glory, not alone that 
they are unsurpassed in poetic beauty, but that they have an eye 
to see God in all his works, and that they witness so forcibly to 
the impression which the visible heavens made upon the soul of 
"the sweet Psalmist of Israel." His shepherd life made him 
familiar with the face of the evening as well as of the morning 
sky. We must suppose that his eye had been often turned up- 
ward and fastened upon the great bodies which stand forth in 
these visible heavens — those that bestud the firmament in the 
night season, as well as upon that grand monarch of the day who 
during his race from eastern sky to western throws all else into 
the shade. In all these he saw God, the great Maker and Father 
of all. 

7. The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul : 
the testimony of the Lord is sure, making wise the simple. 

8. The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the 



84 



PSALM XIX. 



heart : the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlighten- 
ing the eyes. 

9. The fear of the Lord is clean, enduring forever ; the 
judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether. 

Here are six corresponding and nearly parallel statements in 
three pairs, all treating of essentially the same written law of God, 
though under six different designations; "law," "testimony," 
"statutes," commandments," "the fear of the Lord," and "his 
judgments;" in each case giving one denning characteristic in a 
single word, and then adding one statement as to its precious re- 
sults or effects — all with the same systematic order. It will be 

asked, What precisely does the Psalmist mean by "law," "com- 
mandment?" etc. Is it the moral law of the ten commandments 
and this only ; or is it this, including also all the statutes, civil 
or religious, of the Mosaic code? The latter, manifestly, and 
nothing less, if we may judge from the variety of terms and 
phrases used, here, and from the fact that precisely those terms and 
phrases are used to represent the entire civil, ceremonial, and 
religious code as given by the Lord through Moses. I can see no 
reason for restricting the language to the ten commandments. 
Indeed there are many things in the historic portions of the Pen- 
tateuch, falling naturally under the head of "judgments," e. g., 
the visitations of God upon Sodom, Egypt, Pharaoh, Korah, etc., 
which had their moral lessons no less truly than the statute laws. 
It would seem more appropriate to include these than to exclude 
every thing but the ten commandments. The written law as it was 
in the hand of David could not have been less and perhaps may 
not have been more than the Pentateuch. This was known by 
the Jews through all ages as distinctively " the Law," and as 
given through Moses [John 1: 17]. 

Psalm 119 is precisely an expansion of these verses [7-12], 
with the same leading phrases, the same strain of thought, only 
opened and enlarged much more fully in the line of the writer's 
heart-experiences of love, esteem, admiration for this " law of the 

Lord." This law is here said to be "perfect," i. e., complete 

and without defect; and "converting" or more precisely restoring 
"the soul," as the same words are used (Ps. 23 : 3) — "he restoreth 
my soul," i. e., renews its spiritual strength. According to its 
primary sense, this word might refer to spiritual conversion from 
sin to holiness ; it might also refer to spiritual quickening, im- 
parted to one already converted. The general strain of this 
passage, however, must apply to a child of God, one who loves 
the law of God and who purposely and earnestly sets himself to 
a holy life and studies the law of God as the legitimate means 
for discovering and expelling his "errors and secret faults." 
Hence it is best to interpret. this word accordingly. " The tes- 
timony of the Lord," a name applied to the law because it is his 
testimony against sin, wrong-doing, and in favor of the right, "is 



PSALM XIX. 



85 



sure," literally reliable, veracious, truth only with no admixture 
of error or falsehood. "It maketh wise the simple" who are 
here, not the easily seduced — the sense common in Solomon's 
writings — but those who are open and simple-hearted as opposed 
to prejudice, a stubborn self-will and self-made moral blindness. 

" The statutes of the Lord are right," commending themselves 

as right to every honest conscience; and gladdening the hearts of 

all who love equity. "The commandment of the Lord is pure," 

morally faultless ; and " it enlightens the eyes," either in the 
sense of revealing new light as to human duty, or of inspiring 
hope and joy, i. <?., of dispelling darkness and gloom and of 
shedding the light of gladness on the soul. The latter is a very 
common conception in the Hebrew writings. But there can be 
no strong objection to the sense of spiritual illumination as to 

truth and duty. -"The fear of the Lord" is somewhat often 

made synonymous with true piety, and seems here to be trans- 
ferred to that which begets piety, viz. : the law of God. We are 
pressed to this construction by the tenor of the whole passage. 
The writer had perhaps mostly exhausted the Hebrew syno- 
nyms for law, and therefore indulged himself in this license of 
using a phrase which describes a state of heart for that which 
naturally produces it; the name of the cause being given to the 

effect. "Clean" is here in its moral sense, pure, undefiled. 

" Standing forever," never to be abrogated. The great moral 
lessons of even the ceremonial and sacrificial system could never 

lose their force. The form might change ; the spirit never. 

"Judgment" has a broad range of possible meanings — e. g., stat- 
utes, considered as expressions of the divine will ; the decisions of 
a ruler or judge, passed upon moral actions; and sometimes even 
the execution of a legal sentence, and especially the punishment 
which God visits upon sin. The drift of the passage and the 
demands of substantial parallelism favor the sense first above indi- 
cated, that of statutes, as the leading idea. They are declared to 
be true and all righteous. 

10. More to be desired are they than gold, yea, than much 
fine gold : sweeter also than honey and the honey-comb. 

"More to be desired" — strictly, loved, cherished, valued — and 
measured here by that which men most prize and by general con- 
sent have made the standard of value — gold. So the next figure 
compares the sweetness of this law of the Lord to that of honey, 
even when dripping fresh from the comb. Thus the love of the 
heart for God and his law is set forth as stronger than the 
strongest earthly passions of men — those for most precious gold 
and most luscious honey. Each reader may wisely ask, Is this 
true of me ? 

11. Moreover by them is thy servant warned: and in 
keeping of them there is great reward. 

" Warned" in the sense of instructed, enlightened. The re- 
8 



86 



PSALM XIX. 



ward of obedience to this law is great — in a right heart; a peace- 
ful tranquil mind ; a loving spirit which brings its own reward of 
bliss, but which ensures also a rich and eternal reward of blessed- 
ness from the Great Father. 

12. Who can understand /it's, errors ? cleanse thou me from 
secret faults. 

13. Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins; 
let them have not have dominion over me : then shall I be 
upright, and I shall be innocent from the great transgres- 
sion. 

The Mosaic law made a broad distinction between sins of ignor- 
ance, inadvertence, or error, on the one hand; and presumptuous 
sins, i. e., sins with a bold heart and a high hand on the other. 
The former are spoken of in Lev. 4: 2, 22, 27, and Num. 15: 27; 
the latter in Num. 15: 30, 31, and Deut. 17: 12, 13. The par- 
allelism renders it probable, if not certain, that in v. 12 
" errors " and " secret faults " are put in the same class, not of pre- 
sumptuous sins, but sins of ignorance, mistake, inadvertence. The 
study of the Mosaic law and of his own heart and life had im- 
pressed David with a deep sense of the great difficulty of know- 
ing his own heart to the bottom, and of discerning the applica- 
tions of the law of God in all its breadth and spirituality. Under 
these impressions he cries out, "Who can understand his errors? 
Cleanse thou me from secret, unnoticed, unobserved sins." He 
also prays not less fervently that he may be effectually restrained 
from presumptuous sins ; that their dominion over his soul may be 
forever broken ; and that no temptation from excited passion may 

ever 'hurry him into such sin. "Innocent," not from "the" 

great transgression as if his eye were on some one special form 
far above all others in malignity; but from "great transgression," 
i. e., from any considerable, grave transgression. It thus be- 
comes clear that David set his heart most fully and strongly 
against presumptuous sins, spoken of here as " great transgres- 
sions," and also that he had a deep sense of the difficulty of guard- 
ing effectually against the other class of sins, but gave himself 
to the effort with earnest purpose and sought help from the Lord 
in prayer for absolute purity, even from "secret" sins. David 
manifestly made much use of the law of God as well as of prayer 
in both these lines of moral effort toward personal and complete 
victory over sin. 

14. Let the words of my mouth, and the meditation of 
my heart, be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my strength, 
and my redeemer. 

The Hebrew words for "be acceptable" are of constant use in 
the Levitical law for sacrifices and offerings acceptable to God. 
Obviously David's thought is upon those prescribed services and 



PSALM XX. 



87 



sacrifices by means of which sinners may approach the sinless 

One acceptably. In these closing words the highest aspirations 

of David's heart culminate. 0 that my words and thoughts might 
be such as please God ! 0 let me be so pure from sin, so fully in 
the spirit of the prescribed sacrifices for sin, that he can graciously 

receive me as his pardoned and purified child ! Thus closes 

this admirable and wonderful Psalm. The poetry and beauty of 
the first part will fascinate many, and not unworthily ; but a no- 
bler spirit reigns in this latter portion, a grander aspiration, a 
high aim, more worthy of an immortal being made in the image 
of God and nobly laboring upward to regain the purity and per- 
fection of moral character which are pleasing before the Great 
Father. 

W^OO 

PSALM XX. 

This Psalm was composed for the emergency of a pending war, 
of which the indications are "the day of trouble" (v. 1); that 
prayer for help in batttle is the strain of the whole Psalm ; the 
offering of special sacrifices preliminary to the going forth to war 
(v. 3); the setting up of military banners in the name of their 
God (v. 5); the fact that their enemies gloried in chariots and in 
horses, God's people in his name alone (v. 7) ; and that in this 
conflict their enemies fell and they rose in strength and victory 
(v. 8). These points harmonize readily with the historic account 
of David's war against the combined forces of Ammon and Syria 
as recorded^ in 2 Sam. 10 : 6-19 and 1 Chron. 19 : 6-19. The 
prayerful spirit which pervaded this expedition appears even in the 
history : " Be of good courage and let us behave ourselves valiantly 
for our people and for the cities of our God; and let the Lord do 
that which is good in his sight" (1 Chron. 19: 13). We may there- 
fore suppose this Psalm to have been composed for the worship 
[and prayers] of the tabernacle on this momentous occasion. 
It should be borne in mind that these were the most powerful 
enemies with whom David ever came into the collision of arms. 

1. The Lord hear thee in the day of trouble; the name 
of the God of Jacob defend thee ; 

2. Send thee help from the sanctuary, and strengthen 
thee out of Zion ; 

This was a critical hour. The might of Ammon, savage and 
fierce in arms, was more than duplicated by a most formidable 
alliance with Syria, constituting a military crisis for the relatively 
small kingdom of Israel. Hence the prayer : " Let Jehovah, our 
covenant God, hear thee in this day of trouble; let the name — all 
the glorious perfections — all the power and wisdom of the God of 
Jacob, set thee on high in safety and victory; send thee help from 
his own abode, his sanctuary in Zion." 



88 



PSALM XX. 



3. Eemember all thy offerings, and accept thy burnt 
sacrifice ; Selah. 

4. Grant thee according to thine own heart, and fulfill 
all thy counsel. 

"May he notice with favor thy offerings and thy sacrifices" — 
the first of the two terms, "offerings," including the vegetable 
class, and the second the animal which were offered by fire. The 
word for "accept" means, primarily, to make fat, then to account 
as fat and so to regard with favor. The fat was burned on the 
altar — vital to the acceptance of the sacrifice. "Selah" indi- 
cates a pause, perhaps for silent prayer. Here was the appropri- 
ate place to ask that God would grant all the king's desire and 
help him to accomplish all his purposes. 

5. We will rejoice in thy salvation, and in the name of 
our God we will set up our banners : the Lord fulfill all 
thy petitions. 

The setting up, unfurling, of military banners in the name of 
their God indicates the religious feeling with which they went 
forth to this war. " Our God" expressed their relation to the 
Most High and the ground of their confidence of success. 

6. Now know I that the Lord saveth his anointed ; he 
will hear him from his holy heaven with the saving strength 
of his right hand. 

The writer and every one of the people worshiping and praying 
in the words of this song might say : " J," " I know that the Lord, 
the faithful God, will save his anointed king." The anointing was 
God's own designation of David to the throne as the man of his 
own heart to rule his people Israel. Hence these words of confi- 
dent assurance, beautifully thrown in with these supplications. The 
last clause might as well have been read, "with the strength of 
his saving right hand" — that right hand which is so gloriously 
clothed with power unto salvation. 

7. Some trust in chariots, and some in horses : but we 
will remember the name of the Lord our God. 

The Hebrew gives but one verb for this verse — translated 
"remember." This should be used instead of "trust" in the 
first clause. Inasmuch as this remembering the name of the 
Lord is remembering with prayer and praise, and at this stage 
of the song with praise especially, the verse may be translated 
thus: "Some" {i. e., our enemies) "glory in chariots and horses; 
but we will glory in the name of Jehovah alone," our faithful and 
Almighty God. 

8. They are brought down and fallen : but we are risen, 
and stand upright. 



PSALM XXII. 



89 



They, glorying in their chariots and horses, are brought down 
and have utterly fallen : but God has given us the victory. We 
have risen from our former low estate and have become estab- 
lished in power and fame before the nations. Such historically 
was the result of this victory. 

9. Save, Lord : let the king hear us when we call. 

Some critics prefer to change the punctuation and construction 
so as to read: "Lord, save the king: hear us when we call." 
The traditional authority of the ancient Hebrew scholars is 
strongly in favor of the punctuation followed in our English ver- 
sion, in which case "the king" with the article i. e., the Great 
King, is Jehovah himself, the real King over the covenant people 
under the theocracy. Let the Great King of the land hear us when 
wo call on him for his saving power in this emergency ! Similarly 
in Ps. 48 : 2, " the city of the Great King ;" and in Deut. 33 : 5, 
" He was King in Jeshurun," i. e., over his upright people. 

PSALM XXI. 

This Psalm bears somewhat close relations to the preceding one, 
that being mainly prayer for divine help in the emergency of a 
pending war; this, a joyful thanksgiving for victories achieved, 
coupled with expressions of assurance that other victories will fol- 
low. Probably the victory obtained over Ammon and the capture 
of its great city Rabbah, as recorded in the history (2 Sam. 12: 
30, 31) constitute the occasion of this Psalm. Compare v. 3 with 
2 Sam. 12 : 30, and v. 9 here with v. 31 there. Then if we bear 
in mind also that the great promises given to David, recorded 2 
Sam. 7, expanded also in Ps. 89, were then recent and fresh before 
his mind, and that he thought of these victories over Ammon and 
Rabbah as pledges of the same divine favor which was manifested 
there in those promises of the great Messiah, and a sort of guar- 
anty that they should be fulfilled to him and to God's people in yet 
greater victories of truth through this most Mighty Conqueror in 
his far more lasting reign, we shall be in a position to understand 
the scope and spirit of this interesting Psalm. 

1. The king shall joy in thy strength, O Lord ; and in 
thy salvation how greatly shall he rejoice ! 

This king is David. The Hebrew word lacks the article which 
distinguishes it from the King, the great King of Ps. 20 : 9. Yet 
the relations were close between David, the Lord's chosen and 
anointed king of Israel, and the Great Anointed One [Messiah], 

his prophetic son and his successor on an eternal throne. The 

tone of this verse is that of exultant joy in the strength of the 
Most High who had given David a signal victory over his most for- 
midable enemies. 



90 



PSALM XXI. 



2. Thou hast given him his heart's desire, and hast not 
withholden the request of his lips. Selah. 

3. For thou preventest him with the blessings of good- 
ness : thou settest a crown of pure gold on his head. 

The prayer which mostly fills the previous Psalm has now been 

answered. " Preventest," in the ancient sense of this word — to 

come in before him, to meet him even while yet speaking, with most 

precious blessings. This "crown of pure gold" may be the 

very one captured at Rabbah, and thenceforward worn by David. 
The historic record states (1 Chron. 20: 2): "David took the 
crown of their king from off his head and found it to weigh a 
talent of gold, and there were precious stones in it; and it was set 
upon David's head." 

4. He asked life of thee, and thou gayest it him, even 
length of days forever and ever. 

David had prayed for life, in a larger sense than merely added 
days — a sense which included prosperity, and especially a throne 
perpetuated to his posterity after him. The history shows (2 Sam. 
7 : 18, 19, 2G, 29) that David was deeply affected with the wealth 
of these promises, and most of all, the duration of these blessings : 
" Thou hast spoken of thy servant's house for a great while to 
come ! " "Let the house of thy servant David be established be- 
fore thee ;" " With thy blessing let the house of thy servant be 
blessed forever." These expressions in that remarkable prayer ex- 
plain the corresponding language here, " length of days forever and 
ever," showing that his mind is upon the perpetuation of his throne 
in the great Messiah. 

5. His glory is great in thy salvation : honor and majesty 
hast thou laid upon him. 

6. For thou hast made him most blessed forever : thou 
hast made him exceeding glad with thy countenance. 

"Laid upon him" in the sense of conferred, bestowed. 

" Made him most blessed," is in Hebrew : Hast made him blessings 
forever — a fountain of blessings to others, with an eye probably to 
the form of the promise made to Abraham : " In thy seed shall all 

nations be blessed" (Gen. 22: 18). "Exceeding glad with thy 

countenance," means with the manifestations of thy presence, the 
light of thy face, thy favor and love. 

7. For the king trusteth in the Lord, and through the 
mercy of the Most High he shall not be moved. 

These great blessings came through faith in God. 33ecause the 
king is trusting and has trusted in Jehovah, therefore is his mercy 

so great toward his believing servant. " Shall not be moved," 

the Hebrew conception of a stable throne — one not to be disturbed 
by hostile powers. 



PSALM XXII. 



91 



8. Thine Land shall find out all thine enemies : thy 
right hand shall find out those that hate thee. 

9. Thou shalt make them as a fiery oven in the time of 
thine anger : the Lord shall swallow them up in his wrath, 
and the fire shall devour them. 

10. Their fruit shalt thou destroy from the earth, and 
their seed from among the children of men. 

To find all his enemies ; to destroy them with terrible destruc- 
tion — the Almighty himself being the great agent in this result ; 
to exterminate their race ; these are the points here made, indica- 
ting most complete destruction. The history gives a similar view 

of this destruction (2 Sam. 12: 31). The first clause of v. 9 

should read: " Thou shalt make them as an oven of fire in the time 
of thy presence," i. e., in the day when thou shalt meet them face 
to face for retribution. 

11. For they intended evil against thee : they imagined 
a mischievous device, which they are not able to perforin. 

12. Therefore shalt thou make them turn their back, 
when thou shalt make ready thine arrows upon thy strings 
against the face of them. 

"They intended evil against thee; " but the original means more 
than a mental intention : they set forward their schemes ; or fol- 
lowing out the figure of the Hebrew words, they stretched abroad 
their nets for mischief to thee. They devised artful mischief, but 

were powerless, as the concise form of the Hebrew ha3 it. The 

reason is then given: "for" (not "therefore") God interposes: 
"Thou shalt set them backwise," i. e., with their back toward their 

enemies. "On thy bowstring thou wilt prepare" [thine arrows] 

"to their face." The arrows of the Almighty meet them in front 
The word arrow, however, is not expressed, but implied. The over- 
throw of this enemy is ascribed in many forms to the might of 
Israel's God. 

13. Be thou exalted, Lord, in thine own strength : so 
will we sing and praise thy power. 

For all these interpositions of mercy and power, let the Lord 
Jehovah be exalted on high as one infinitely worthy to reign, and 
let us sing and give praise to him in grateful song ! 

PSALM XXII. 

This Psalm classes itself with the sixteenth. In the interpre- 
tation of this as of that the first and main question is ; " Of whom 
spake the prophet this ; of himself, or of some other man ?" The 



92 



PSALM XXII. 



primary question, important above all others, is whether the per- 
son speaking here, the "I" of this Psalm, is David or is Christ? 

1 am well aware of another mode of putting the theory of the 

Psalm, viz. : that it presents an idealized picture of a pious suf- 
ferer. Adding this to the other two alternatives and assuming 
what all admit — that David wrote the Psalm, we may inquire : 
(1.) Did he personate himself, i. e., write this of himself as his 

personal history and experience? or, (2.) Did he intentionally 

personate (in the same sense of this word) not himself specially, 
but all the suffering pious, giving an ideal conception of the life- 
experiences of this whole class? or, (3.) Did he write pro- 
phetically of the Messiah, his greater Son, destined, as being 
inspired he might know him to be, to these most peculiar sufferings 
of scorn and heart-trials, waxing more and more fearful unto 
death, yet finally resulting in glorious salvation to the race? 

The first view is held largely by the German school of critics 
and by all of neological tendencies. The second has some able advo- 
cates ; e. g., Professor Alexander who says: "The subject of this 
Psalm is the deliverance of a righteous sufferer from his enemies, 
and the effect of this deliverance on others. It is so framed as to 
be applied without violence to any case belonging to the class 
described, yet so that it was fully verified only in Christ, the head 
and representative of the class in question. The immediate 
speaker in the Psalm is an ideal person, the righteous servant of 
Jehovah, but his words may, to a certan extent, be appropriated 
by any suffering believer, and by the whole suffering church, as 
they have been in all ages." The writer in Smith's Bible Dic- 
tionary says : " The most thoroughly idealized picture suggested by 
a retrospect of all the dangers of his outlaw life is that presented 

to us by David in Ps. 22." That David's personal history and 

experiences were in such a sense present to his mind as to furnish 
to him largely the language and illustrations, especially in the 
portion descriptive of suffering, I see no occasion to deny. This 
admission by no means carries with it the theory that he wrote it 
properly concerning himself, or even of the entire body of pious 
sufferers. The theory that David wrote the Psalm under inspi- 
ration and of Christ I accept, and maintain it on the following 
grounds : 

1. The passages which are quoted from it by the Evangelists, 
and declared, or assumed to be prophecies of Christ; e. g. } (v. 18) 
" They part my garments among them and cast lots for my ves- 
ture." Of this circumstance John speaks very definitely^ thus : 
" Then the soldiers when they had crucified Jesus took his gar- 
ments and made four parts, to every soldier a part ; and also his 
coat : now the coat was without seam, wove from the top through- 
out. They said therefore among themselves, Let us not rend it 
but cast lots for it whose it shall be ; that the scripture might be 
fulfilled which saith, "They parted my raiment among them and 
for my vesture they did cast lots." See also Luke 23: 34. 



PSALM XXII. 



93 



Also v. 22. " I will declare thy name unto my brethren : in the 
midst of the congregation will I praise thee" — which the writer 
of the Epistle to the Hebrews (2: 11, 12) quotes to show that 
Jesus recognized his people as his brethren and therefore passed 
through suffering unto perfect salvation even as they do, and is 
not ashamed to call them brethren because they really are, both 
in view of his complete human nature and of his common sym- 
pathy with them in suffering. My argument here is that the 
Apostle assumes this language to be that of Christ, not of David ; 
that if these words from the Psalm mean David, his argument is 
utterly null and void. 

2. A second ground, somewhat less conclusive, yet having 
weight in connection with the preceding point and with those that 
follow, is the fact that the language of this Psalm is appropriated 
by Christ and used of himself; and is also taken up, unwittingly, 
we suppose, yet very suggestively, by Christ's enemies. Thus the 
first words of this Psalm are precisely appropriated by Jesus on 
the cross. (See Matt. 27: 46 and Mark 15: 34). I admit that 
Jesus might have taken these words from this Psalm even if 
David had written them of himself or of some ideal sufferer ; but 
I maintain that he used them with far more pertinence if they 

were really spoken of him and for him in prophecy. The revil- 

ings cast upon the sufferer in this Psalm are one of its most prom- 
inent features. Now it is a remarkable fact that the revilers of 
Jesus (by some unconscious influence, must we not say, on their 
hearts and lips) use these very words. Compare the words here, 
vs. 7, 8, with their words as in Matt. 27: 39, 42, 43, and Mark 15 : 
29-31 and Luke 23 : 39. The fullness and minuteness with which 
the gospel historians quote these words of Christ's revilers indi- 
cate plainly that they regarded them as a definite fulfillment of 
the Psalm before us. 

3. A third ground is the precision with which the very mode of 
Christ's death is indicated; the fact that this mode is utterly 
foreign to Jewish usage in capital punishment ; and that such a 
death and even such wounds are unknown to Jewish history save in 

the death of Christ. In v. 16, we read: "They pierced my 

hands and my feet." Years later, another prophecy said : "They 
shall look on me whom they have pierced and shall mourn." (Zech. 
12: 10). As if with an eye on these prophecies, John the 
Revelator wrote: "Behold, he cometh with clouds; and every eye 
shall see him, and they also who pierced him." This most cruel 
mode of death by being transfixed on the cross appearing thus 
both in prophecy and in history shows how strongly it had im- 
pressed the minds of the sacred writers ; or rather how promin- 
ently it lay before the mind of the inditing Spirit. But this 

passage (v. 16) involves some critical questions. Its full con- 
sideration is therefore deferred to its place in the chapter. 

4. It is at least strongly implied that these sufferings of the 
Great Sufferer terminated in death, yet none the less in ultimate 
victory. The indications of death are these: (a) In v. 15, "Thou 

5 



94 



PSALM XXII. 



hast brought me into the dust of death." The Hebrew puts this 
in the future tense: "Thou wilt bring me," etc., which we can 
not interpret as a groundless fear, but must take as a definite 
prophetic anticipation, (b) V. 16, "They pierced my hands and 
my feet." Here the argument stands or falls with the construc- 
tion which 'refers these words to crucifixion. If they have this 
reference, they of course assume a termination of his sufferings 
in death, (c) In v. 18, the "parting of his garments and casting 
lots for his vesture " certainly assume that he is slain and that 
his murderers, according to usage, are disposing of his garments. 
Be it also considered that his prayer (v. 20), "Deliver my soul 
from the sword," etc., does not, as applied to Jesus, militate against 
the idea of his death ; since the writer to the HeDrews (5 : 7) dis- 
tinctly informs us that " after strong crying and tears to him who 
was able to save him from death, he was heard in respect to that 
thing which he feared;" but that thing was not that he might be 
spared from death, for beyond all question that writer knew that 
Jesus actually died. There, as here, death brought victory. This 
mighty struggle of prayer labored upon some other point than 
mere dying. His prayer seems to have been that he might die in 
such a spirit of endurance, faith, and triumph over Satan, that his 
death might be a perfect success — a result which is richly indi- 
cated in the closing portion of this Psalm. As to the point of 

our present argument it will be readily seen that if real death is 
involved in the case of this sufferer, he can not be David, for 
David died in a good old age, after a successful forty years' reign. 
Nor can it be applied with any greater facility to the supposed 
ideal sufferer — the whole race of suffering good men — for such a 
death as is indicated here is entirely out of place in a comprehen- 
sive ideal view of their life-history. True, all the good of earth 
die ; but only a minute fraction die by violent persecution — under 
such insults as these. 

5. Entirely conclusive in my view to the Messianic character of 
this entire Psalm is the co-relation between the latter portion (vs. 
22-31) and the former (vs. 1-21). The latter portion gives us the 

results of these sufferings. And what are they? First, "I will 

declare thy name unto my brethren " — words which appear in the 
last verses of the longest recorded prayer of Jesus (John 17 : 26) : " I 
have declared unto them thy name and will declare it ;" and are here 
as one of the great ends of his mission to earth. Next a thanks- 
giving feast in which the sufferer pays his vows after the manner 
of pious Israelites. This, remarkably, shades off into the great 
gospel feast, probably suggesting this current usage of Jesus and 
of the gospel historians ; for in this case, as in that of gospel his- 
tory, the "meek" [i. e., the humble, the broken of heart for sin] 
"shall eat and be satisfied;" their mouths are filled with praise; 
their "hearts live forever" with that eternal life which none can 
give but Jesus : and then the range and scope of these blessings 
spread out to embrace the "wide, wide world," for "all the ends 
of the world shall remember and turn unto the Lord, and all tho 



PSALM XXII. 



95 



kindreds of the nations shall worship before thee." The gospel 
goes forth conquering and to conquer; the rightful rule of the 
Lord Jehovah becomes supreme over all the nations. Generation 
after generation down through the lapse of the ages, this su- 
premacy endures, his kingdom an everlasting kingdom and his 

dominion one that has no end. Such are the results of glorious 

victory and triumph to the gospel and to the kingdom of Christ 
over the nations which come of the sufferings through which this 

Great Sufferer is presented in this Psalm as passing. Now can 

this sufferer be David himself and David only? Was there in his 
life any co-related results worthy of being put in such words as 
these ? Not by any means. These results can be no other than 
those which attend the sufferings of the great Messiah. In him 
we see them fully developed. That his sufferings and the conse- 
quent "glory" were bound together by the strongest mutual co- 
relation is signified in those comprehensive words of Peter, giving 
the gist of Old Testament prophecy in which "the Spirit of Christ 
testified beforehand the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should 
follow" (1 Pet. 1 : 11). Precisely this co-relation appears in Isaiah 
53, where, "making his soul an offering for sin," but seeing the 
fruit of this agony to his full satisfaction and " dividing the spoil 
with the mighty" are the attendant results. The scope of this 
Psalm, co-relating such results of gospel victory with such suffer- 
ings, forbid us to see here David only or indeed at all ; and shut 
us up to Christ only and alone as fulfilling this Psalm. 

The caption, " Upon Aijeleth Shahar," involves critical uncer- 
tainties as usual. The main question is whether these words are 
to be taken as the first words of some other ode, indicating here 
the tune to which this should be sung; or whether their proper 
significance is intended to suggest in a somewhat enigmatic way 
the sentiment of this Psalm. The words seem to mean : 
" The hind of the dawn." The hind, hunted down, grievously 
abused, yet a model of what is innocent and harmless, may sug- 
gest this sufferer; the "dawn" may be the joyful issue of such 
sufferings in the breaking forth of glorious day after the dark- 
ness of midnight. We can afford to accept this construction as 

on the whole more probable than any other. 

1. My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why 
art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my 
roaring ? 

The original makes but one question, continuing the thought 
thus : " Why hast thou forsaken me, being afar from my help and 
from the words of my plaintive cry ?" The last word, "roaring," 
is obnoxious to unpleasant associations which may fitly be avoided. 

The words, " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? " 

were uttered by Jesus under the agonies of the cross (See Matt. 
27 : 46 and Mark 15 : 34). We must suppose that he used these 
words because they well expressed his thought and feeling, and 



96 



PSALM XXII. 



with high probability, because he recognized them as prophetic of 
his agony of soul in these last hours of woe. Beyond this who can 
go ? How shall we account for that sense of being forsaken of 
his^ God ? What can we say of its occasion, or of its causes, or 
of its elements ? The inner chambers of the spirit's deep agony 
are always sacred ; in this case, more than sacred ; they are mys- 
terious, unfathomable, having to do with the little known relations 
of the world's great vicarious Sufferer to the Supreme Governor 
of the Moral Universe in a point involving a propitiatory sacrifice 
for sin, the vital elements of which are among the deepest things 
of his moral reign. 

2. O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou nearest not ; 
and in the night season, and am not silent. 

This represents the cry for help to be somewhat long protracted. 
The history of Jesus gives some intimations of this great conflict 
of soul, other than those which appear in Gethsemane and on 
Calvary. We can not know their actual duration nor the suggestive 
or other influences which seem to have induced them on special 
occasions, as when he said: "Now is my soul troubled, and what 
shall I say ? Father save me from this hour ? [Nay]." But for 
this cause came I unto this hour (John 12 : 27). 

3. But thou art holy, 0 thou that inhabitest the praises 
of Israel. 

4. Our fathers trusted in thee : they trusted and thou 
didst deliver them. 

5. They cried unto thee, and were delivered : they trusted 
in thee, and were not confounded. 

Thou art holy and consequently wise and good ; my soul shall 
bow sweetly and trustfully to thy will. Admirably in harmony 
with the spirit of these words, Jesus closed his prayer of agony 
that " if possible the cup might pass from him," with these memora- 
ble words: "Not my will but thine be done." The allusion to 

"the fathers" who had trusted God in their affliction and had 
been delivered, is eminently suggestive, showing the divine pur- 
pose in the permanent record of such examples — not to say also 
in permitting such cases to exist as examples. "Thou that in- 
habitest the praises of Israel," abiding in the temple amid its hal- 
lowed songs and being the supreme object of their constant wor- 
ship. 

6. But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, 
and despised of the people. 

7. All they that see me laugh me to scorn : they shoot 
out the lip, they shake the head, saying, 

8. He trusted on the Lokd that he would deliver him : 
let him deliver him, seeing he delighted in him. 



PSALM XXII. 



97 



"A worm," i. e., in the estimation of the people, as the strain 
of the passage indicates. "And no man"— not a man respected 
of men, the writer in this case selecting that Hebrew word for 
"man" * which signifies one held in honor, a man of rank. "A 
reproach of men," even of the lower class, of man considered, as 
earth-born, f Even they despise me. "They shoot out the lip," 
literally, pout with the lip, to express the most sovereign contempt. 

The Hebrew word translated "trusted" [i. e., "on the Lord"] 

means primarily to roll, i e., to devolve upon the Lord whatever 
may be your burden. It is used most expressively in this sense 
in Fs. 37 : 5, " Roll thy way upon Jehovah ; " and in Prov. 16 : 3, 

Roll thy work upon Jehovah." Peter has the same thought in 
his words, " Casting all your care upon him, for he careth for 
you," (1 Peter, 5:7). It stands here in the imperative — a fact best 
explained by supposing that his revilers tauntingly retort his own 
words : " Thou who hast so often said, Roll every burden upon 
Jehovah, try it in thine own time of need. God will doubtless 
deliver thee ! God will rescue him, for he delights in him!" — all 
said in contemptuous irony. The men who thus reviled him were 
the last men in the world to believe one word of it. As al- 
ready shown, all these words were said by the scribes and Phari- 
sees to the suffering Jesus in the very spirit which is here indi- 
cated. Unconsciously to themselves they were fulfilling prophecy, 
altogether unaware that " thus it was written and thus it behooved 
Christ to suffer" (Luke 24: 46). Other prophecy at a later day 
repeated some of these very words. " Thus saith the Lord . . . 
to him whom man despiseth, to him whom the nation abhorreth" 
(Isa. 49 : 7). "He was despised and rejected of men ... he 
was despised and we esteemed him not " (Isa. 53 : 3). 

9. But thou art he that took me out of the womb : thou 
didst make me hope when I ivas upou my mother's breasts. 

10. I was cast upon thee from the womb : thou art my 
God from my mother's belly. 

The natural influence of such revilings must be to depress the 
spirits, sadden the heart, and throw the pious man back upon his 
God. So here: My God has had the care of me since my very 
birth ; has all along since that hour been training me to trust in 
him and giving me ever fresh proofs of his loving care; and shall 

I despair of his love and of his help now? Whatever may 

have been true in this respect of David's infancy, we know it was 
all strikingly true of Jesus — named and destined to his high mis- 
sion while yet unborn ; shielded from Herod's wrath by divine 
admonition ; sent into Egypt and then brought back and closeted 
away from the envy and rage of Pharisee and priest in dark 
Galilee, till his work was largely done. 



08 



PSALM XXII. 



11. Be not far from me; for trouble is near; for there is 
none to help. 

12. Many bulls have compassed me strong bulls of 
Bashan have beset me round. 

13. They gaped upon me with their mouths, as a raven- 
ing and a roaring lion. 

These figures come from pastoral life — natural to David. The 
cattle of Bashan were reputed to be both fat and fierce. Surround- 
ing their victims, bellowing and tearing, or like a lion devouring 
his prey and roaring, they were forcible images of his fierce, 
blood-thirsty enemies. 

14. I am poured out like water, and all my bones are out 
of joint : my heart is like wax; it is melted in the midst of 
my bowels. 

15. My strength is dried up like a potsherd ; and my 
tongue cleaveth to my jaws ; and thou hast brought me 
into the dust of death. 

Here we see the sufferer faint, exhausted, agonized as if his 
bones were dislocated at every joint; his heart like melted wax; 
his strength dried and gone ; his tongue parched with thirst — one 
of the common results of extreme suffering and very definitely 
fulfilled in [Jesus crucified; and finally in the climax he says, 
" Thou wilt put me into the dust of death!" The original makes 
this verb future; not "thou hast brought," but thou ivilt,etc, in- 
dicating at least the fear, and more naturally the definite expecta- 
tion, of death as the result. These various phrases combine to 
give the idea of extreme nervous exhaustion. Such we know to 
have been the last hours of Jesus. A whole night, not only 
sleepless but full of earnest thought and intense emotion; the 
passover, the long conversations and prayer which fill five pre- 
cious chapters in John's narrative (13-17); the scenes of Gethse- 
mane, the betrayal and arrest; the preliminary examination before 
Ananias Ja the more protracted one before Caiaphas and the 
Sanhedrim ; the hearing before Pilate ; then before Herod ; then 
again before Pilate; the decree for his crucifixion; the weary 
faintness which sunk under the wood of his own cross — all these 
things were at once the causes and the proofs of exhaustion really 
extreme, leaving no nervous energy to bear up against the terri- 
ble agony of crucifixion. 

16. For dogs have compassed me : the assembly of the 
wicked have inclosed me : they pierced my hands and my 
feet. 

"Dogs" are in figure for ferocious men. But we must not find 
this figure in the American dog of civilized society, domesticated, 



PSALM XXII. 



99 



petted, cultivated ; but in the Asiatic, wild and savage, a terror to 

men. "Assembly" is the usual word for "congregation," the 

assembled people who offered their worship at God's temple, but 
in the case of Jesus, a people utterly apostate from God, awfully 
wicked, madly enraged against the meek and lovely Sufferer who 

had fallen into their grasp. In the last clause the word for 

" pierced " has tasked the labors of critics to the utmost. It is 
scarcely possible to lay before the merely English reader the com- 
plicated difficulties which invest the Hebrew word. It occurs in 
precisely this form only once in our Hebrew Bible (viz., Isa. 38 : 
13) ; there in the sense, " as a lion." With only a slight change in 
the first vowel we meet- it also in Num. 24 : 9, and Ezek. 22 : 25, 
in these two passages with the same sense, "as a lion." But this 
sense in the passage before us would be exceedingly inappropriate, 
unnatural, and therefore unsatisfactory, the more so because there 
being no verb in this last clause, we must, by the common laws of 
language, supply the next preceding one, thus : " As a lion they 
enclose, surround, my hands and my feet." It seems incredible th'at 

D<avid could have meant to say this.- The case is complicated by 

the presence of three various readings besides the text,* creating 
real doubt as to the precise form of the original. Then we have 
the possibility, not to say probability, of unusual grammatical 
forms, and also of peculiar etymological forms under which the 
word might be a verb from the root,f which means to dig through, 
pierce, or bore. The Septuagint version gives the sense attached 
to the word at the date of its translation (more than two centuries 
before Christ) and this is pierced. In view of all the evidence in 
the case I concur in the conclusion reached by Feurst, the latest 
authority in lexicography, viz., that " it is either the construct 
plural participle or third person plural perfect from (^sO) m t ne 
sense of its cognate and therefore should be translated 

either "piercing" or " they pierced my hands and my feet." This 
sense being granted, the passage becomes a remarkably definite 
prediction of the manner of the Savior's death on the cross — a 
point moreover quite inappplicable to David. 

17. I may tell all my bones : they look and stare upon 
me. 

"I might count all my bones," probably because indicated by 

the pain that filled them. " They, look and stare upon me : " 

" they" not the bones, but the malicious enemies spoken of 
throughout the previous verses of the Psalm. The idea is that 
while every bone seemed to spring into vivid consciousness by its 
distinct sufferings, those enemies were looking and staring at him 
to taunt every pang ! 

18. They part my garments among them, and cast lots 
upon my vesture. 



ro nio nw (n*o* Text, fito ° r to 



100 



PSALM XXII. 



This is a case of minutely definite prophecy, remarkably ful- 
filled. From the pen of John (19 : 23, 24) we have the particulars 
in full. The crucifixion was performed by four Roman soldiers. 
According to usage the clothes of the malefactor were their per- 
quisite. In the present case they divided all except the seamless 
robe into four parts, but this robe (such as the priests wore), a gar- 
ment woven without seam, was so peculiar and so valuable, they 
said, Let it not be rent, i. e., for division among us, but let the lot 

determine who shall have it. Xow it is safe to say that such a 

series of particulars could not be combined in any merely human 
prophecy and its fulfillment more than once in ten thousand public 
executions. Such cases test the genuineness of prophecy. Xo 
eye save that of God could foresee such minute yet improbable 
events. 

19. But be not thou far from me, O Loed : O my 
strength, haste thee to help me. 

20. Deliver my soul from the sword ; my darling from 
the power of the dog. 

21. Save me from the lion's mouth : for thou hast heard 
me from the horns of the unicorns. 

The "sword" is comprehensive for any. instrument or method 

of death by violence. ''Darling" has (in Hebrew) the sense of 

one dearly beloved, most precious, and seems here to be applied 
to life as that which men hold dear above all else. It seems to 
involve the idea of the only thing one has of the kind, and is said 

of life as the only one men have in this world to lose. "From 

the power" [Hebrew, hand] "of the dog," where the word "hand" 
shows that the dog thought of is human, a fellow man, but of 

savage, canine propensities. "Thou hast heard me from the 

horns" — a mode of speech technically called a " constructio 
pregnans" — i. e., a pregnant construction which involves more than 
is expressed : in this case, heard [and delivered] me from the horns 
of the buffalo or wild bull. 

At this point the description of suffering and of prayer closes, 
and we have a sudden transition to joyful thanksgiving and glori- 
ous gospel blessings. The Sufferer's death opened the way to the 
fullest fruition of life and blessedness, not to himself alone, but to 
myriads of those whom he came to seek and to save. 

22. I will declare thy name unto my brethren : in the 
midst of the coDgregation will I praise thee. 

This verse makes two strong points toward the proof that 
the Psalm is thoroughly Messianic. (1.) The writer of the 
Epistle to the Hebrews cites these as the words of Jesus recogniz- 
ing his redeemed people as brethren, of common sympathies, com- 
mon sufferings, and a human nature common in all things with 

his own (2: 11, 12). (2.) The very point affirmed here, "I 

will declare thy name unto my brethren,'" expresses in briefest, 



PSALM XXII. 



101 



most comprehensive terms, one of the main purposes of his earthly- 
mission, and moreover, in the very language which himself used 
in his remarkable prayer (John 17: 26): "I have declared unto 
them thy name and will declare it," That is, I have done what the 
Spirit of prophecy by the mouth of David indicated as the first 
and chief end of my earthly mission touching my redeemed breth- 
ren. "In the midst of the congregation will I praise thee" — 

following in the manner of public praise the usages of pious 
Israelites in the age of David. So we should expect. How else 
could the sense be conveyed save by words and allusions familiar 
to those Hebrew readers ? 

23. Ye that fear the Lord, praise him ; all ye the seed 
of Jacob, glorify him ; and fear him, all ye the seed of 
Israel. 

24. For he hath not despised nor abhorred the affliction 
of the afflicted ; neither hath he hid his face from him ; but 
when he cried unto him, he heard. 

Let all the truly pious, all the friends of God and of his Son, 
unite with me in praising his name because he hath heard my 
prayer from the depth of my affliction and hath not hid his face 
(save for the moment, v. 1), but has borne me triumphantly 

through. It may be asked, What precisely was this "cry?" 

What was the exigency which extorted this prayer of an anguished 
heart; and in what particulars were these prayers heard and 

answered? These questions look down into the depths of the 

agonies of Gethsemane and of Calvary, and ask us to analyze the 
elements of that mysterious woe. I doubt if any human sagacity 
can do it. Men may gather up all the words that fell from the 
lips of the Great Sufferer, and all the allusions made to those 
scenes by other inspired pens (e. g., those words in Heb. 5 : 7, so 
like these : " Who when he had offered up prayers and supplications 
with strong crying tears unto him that was able to save him from 
death, and was heard in [reference to] that he feared ; but when 
all is done has our human line fathomed this suffering to the bottom? 
Has our search brought out all its elements ? We may assign a 
portion of it to those significant words ; " This is your hour and the 
power of darkness" (Luke 22: 53); but even of this, how little 
can we know? As bearing however on the question of the Mes- 
sianic reference of this Psalm or of this part of it, it should suffice 
that the points made here — this most bitter agony ; the extorted cry 
to God for help ; the being heard and delivered from the specific 
thing he feared, and the calling therefore on all the pious to join 
the sufferer in exultant praise and thanksgiving; all these points 
have their precise correspondence in the Xew Testament allu- 
sions to these scenes, and go to certify the complete fulfillment of 
the Psalm in Jesus Christ, and in him only. 

25. My praise shall be of thee in the great congregation : 
I will pay my vows before them that fear him. 



102 



PSALM XXII. 



26. The meek shall eat and be satisfied : they shall praise 
the Lord that seek him : your heart shall live forever. 

_ When the pious Israelite paid his vows and presented his thanks- 
givings before the great congregation, he brought animals for the 
sacrifice of his peace or thank offering [bullocks, calves, goats, or 
sheep] — these only, and these apparently because they were suit- 
able for food, and the Mosaic law prescribed the burning of the fat, 
but reserved a portion of the flesh for a thanksgiving feast of 
which he who brought the offering partook in company with his 
invited friends. They rejoiced together before the Lord in mutual 
thanks for the blessings bestowed upon their friend. This usage 
appears in the verse before us. This Mosaic thanksgiving festival 
became the germ of the New Testament gospel feast to which 
our Lord so often compared the gospel "kingdom of heaven." 
Of this it is here said, "the meek shall eat and be satisfied." 
The "meek" in the sense of the Hebrew are the afflicted who 
have borne their sufferings in patient submission; the humble, 
the lowly of heart — the very class whom our Lord continually 
invites to the great gospel feast. They "shall eat and be satis- 
fied" — shall find this provision all-sufficient and adapted per- 
fectly to their wants. Then they who thus seek God shall have 
infinite cause to praise him. " Their heart shall live," in the 
highest, noblest sense of life, forever. Such life lacks no element 
of real bliss. Its blessedness shall be eternal at God's right 
hand ! Surely this can be nothing less than the blessedness 
which comes through the glorious gospel of Jesus! Thus man- 
ifestly does this thanksgiving festival bring us into the very mar- 
row and fatness of gospel blessings. 

27. All the ends of the world shall remember and turn 
unto the Lord : and all the kindreds of the nations shall 
worship before thee. 

28. For the kingdom is the Lord's : and he is the gov- 
ernor among the nations.- 

The fullness and perfection of these blessings having been 
briefly set forth, it remains to indicate their extent. How widely 
shall they be enjoyed ? Who and how many shall participate ? 
The answer is definite and it is glorious! "All the ends of the 
world shall remember," i. e., shall consider, shall think of these 
things, shall appreciate these blessings, and be attracted and 
drawn back to their Father, God, by this manifestation of his 
infinite love in his suffering, atoning Son. " They shall remember 
and shall turn unto the Lord" in true repentance, earnestly 
forsaking all sin and coming back to God in new obedience, 
gratitude, and love. "All the families of the nations shall wor- 
ship before thee" — all the heathen world shall forsake their idols 
and return to the worship, love, and service of the true God. 
For, the supreme dominion of this world belongs to Jehovah by 



PSALM XXII. 



103 



supreme eternal right — a right which he asserts and will regain ! 
So the spirit of prophecy declared from age to age onward till 
Jesus came, and then renewed the declaration with unabated em- 
phasis. Obadiah said, " The kingdom shall be the Lord's " (v. 21). 
Daniel's words (7: 16) are: "There was given" [to One like the 
Son of Man] " dominion and glory and a kingdom, that all people, 
nations and languages should serve him; his dominion is an 
everlasting dominion." Let it be remembered that according to Ps. 
2: 7, 8, this dominion over the nations was transferred by cove- 
nant ["decree"] from the Father to the Son — the anointed Mes- 
siah. Consequently Jesus himself said, "All power is given unto 
me in heaven and in earth." His beloved disciple expressed the 
grand consummation in the words, "The kingdoms of this world 
are become the kingdom our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall 
reign forever and ever" (Kev. 11: 15). 

29. All they that he fat upon earth shall eat and worship: 
all they that go down to the dust shall bow before him: 
and none can keep alive his own soul. 

This language describes the extremes of society — of course in- 
cluding all the means — all the intermediate classes. The "fat" 
are not in this case, the proud and morally hardened [as some- 
times], but rather the rich, the well-conditioned. Even these shall 
eat at the gospel feast and shall reverently worship their glorious 
Lord and King; and on the other hand, all the goers down into 
the dust — the toiling, down-crushed millions, the enslaved and 
most abject of the race who can not keep alive their own soul, 
whose very lives are not in their own but in some other's keep- 
ing ; even these too shall bow before the Great King and Lord 
of all. 

30. A seed shall serve him ; it shall be accounted to the 
Lord for a generation. 

31. They shall come, and shall declare his righteousness 
unto a people that shall be born, that he hath done this. 

"A seed," a perpetuated race, families in succession from gener 
ation to generation, shall be accounted as the Lord's. They shall 
come promptly forward and declare his righteousness, his manifold 
mercy in this glorious gospel, to generations yet to be born-, be- 
cause the Lord hath accomplished — i. e., fully completed and 
finished this gospel work. No Hebrew word appears, correspond- 
ing to the word "this" at the end of the verse; yet the sense is 
by no means left uncertain by this omission. " Hath accom- 
plished" means hath absolutely "finished all he had purposed and 
promised — hath wrought a most glorious achievement ! It is 
even suggested with some plausibility that the very last words of 
the dying Jesus, u It is finished" had a tacit reference to the last 
words of this remarkably prophetie Psalm, as to which we have 
so many indications that it lay fresh in his mind and warmly on 
his heart during those scenes of his final agony. 



104 



psalm xxm. 



PSALM XXIII. 

This Psalm, justly admired for its exquisite beauty, its sweet 
simplicity, and its precious spiritual experiences, bears in every 
feature the impress of David's hand and no less of David's heart. 
Through all his early years at home amid flocks and folds, green 
pastures and quiet waters — familiar with every thing pertaining 
to the care and comfort of his charge, the young and the aged, 
the weak and the strong; he knew how to use this comparison 
with the utmost facility and pertinence to represent the like care 
and sympathy of his own Jehovah over himself and his fellow 

Israelites. As to date, we must place this Psalm, not in the 

earlier but in the later years of his life, certainly after his trying 
experiences of danger from Saul and after his repeated deliver- 
ances. The goodness and mercy with which God had shielded 
him from those earlier dangers confirmed his faith in God for sim- 
ilar protection through all his future days. This fact with which 
the Psalm closes serves to date the writing of it subsequent to his 
earlier experiences, yet at a point when other years of probable 
life were yet before him. 

1. The Lord is my shepherd ; I shall not want. 

It is the shepherd's business to supply the natural wants of his 
sheep. Are they hungry ? He feeds them. Thirsty ? He pro- 
vides them water to drink. Weary ? He gives them the time and 
place for rest. Are they in peril from wild beasts? He shields 

them with his protection. Their comfort is his constant care. 

Moreover it should be borne in mind that where shepherd-life 
reaches its highest development, and as we might say is made a 
science, there comes to be a degree of mutual acquaintance, at- 
tachment, and "sympathy, quite beyond what appears within the 
narrow range of our American experience. The brief notices of 
shepherd-life in the gospel history touch this point: "He calleth 
his own sheep by name; " " they know his voice; they know not 
the voice of strangers ; a stranger will they not follow," etc. Let 
us think then of five thousand sheep under the care of one kind 
shepherd. He can call whom he will by name ; he knows them 
individually and they know him ; he goes before them with his 
call; they follow close in quick and trustful obedience. Such 
was shepherd-life as it stood before the mind of David, inwrought 
into whole years of his personal experience. With all this expe- 
rience fresh in his heart, he sings, "Jehovah is my shepherd; I 
know his voice and he knows mine and every feature of my indi 
vidual case. Under such a shepherd " I shall not want ; " I can 
never lack any good thing. My shepherd can supply my need ; 
nothing- that I shall ever want can possibly be beyond his power 
to give. I have long known the heart of the good shepherd ; and 



PSALM XXIII. 



105 



now must I not think of my own Jehovah, the ever faithful God, 
as full of the tenderest sympathy and love for his trustful chil- 
dren ? But the idea of God as a shepherd to his people was 

[probably] not original with David. It appears in the recorded 
words of those earlier shepherds, Jacob and Moses ; and we natu- 
rally assume that David had seen it there. Jacob (Gen. 48: 15) 
has the same Hebrew word which David uses here to give the key 
note to this Psalm : " The God who fed me," (i. e. , was my shepherd ) 
all my life long unto this day ; " the Angel who redeemed me from 
all evil, mav he bless the lads" [the two sons of Joseph]. See 

also Gen. 49: 24. Moses (Deut. 32: 12, "So the Lord alone 

did lead him") has the same pastoral word which David makes 
prominent here : " He leadeth me in paths of righteousness." 

2. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures : he 
leadeth me beside the still waters. 

3. He restoreth my soul : he leadeth me in the paths of 
righteousness for his name's sake. 

"Pastures of greenness; " not parched, dry and desolate on the 
desert, barren sand; "waters of stillness;" not the rushing winter 
torrent, full of peril in the rainy season of that climate ; these 
are among the first necessities of the flock. These the good Shep- 
herd, Jehovah, will carefully provide. Then passing suddenly 
from the figure to the reality ; from the things which the flock need 
to the things which the soul of a child of God needs, he proceeds 
to say : He renews my spiritual strength, giving me fresh life and 
power in all holiness ; he leadeth me in paths of uprightness 
according to his own name — the faithful God, the true Jehovah, 
and because he is such a God. — —This is precisely what the true 
child of God most of all desires; not worldly good, not riches, 
not health, not fame ; but an upright life and a heart evermore 
pleasing to God — to be what God would have him and to do in 
all things as the Lord alone may lead him. This leading, more- 
over, is the true pastoral idea — the very thing which the shepherd 
does permanently day after day for his trustful and ever following 
flock. So the Lord alone leads his obedient, believing people. 

4. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow 
of death, I will fear no evil : for thou art with me ; thy rod 
and thy staff they comfort me. 

This "valley of death-shade" need not be restricted to one's 
actual death-scene. The Hebrew term has a broader appli- 
cation, even to any scenes of great darkness, distress, trial, peril. 
We need not exclude those scenes which are wont to precede 
death, nor need we exclude many other scenes in which death is 
not near nor even to be seriously apprehended. Probably David 
had in his mind those years of peril in which, hunted by Saul 
and fleeing before him, his life-path lay through a valley of dark- 
ness almost like that of the grave itself. Yet even so, he says, 



106 



PSALM XXIII. 



I will fear no evil, for though I can not see at all what is before 
me amid such darkness, I can still hear my Shepherd's voice : 
L \Thou art with me" — only one short step before me; "thy rod 
and thy staff will comfort me" — I am ever within the touch of my 
Shepherd's crook and I can feel it guiding my steps through this 
darkness dense as the shadow of death. This seems to be the 
precise conception here — strictly pastoral, in harmony with the 

scope of the entire Psalm. The Shepherd's rod is not by any 

means an instrument for scourging the sheep, but is the Shep- 
herd's crook, used to guide his flock and to defend them in dan- 
ger. The word "staff" is essentially equivalent. The precious 

sentiment here is that in the midst of whatever danger, darkness, 
perplexity; though all other hopes and helpers should fail, yet God 
is the strength of his heart — his comfort, his joy, his sure salva- 
tion. 

5. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of 
mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup 
runneth over. 

The first clause is specially forcible. Who shall be calm and 
brave enough to sit down to his table and enjoy his meal in the 
very presence of deadly enemies? What power is competent to 
spread such a table for us and make us thus calm and fearless in 
the face of cruel foes ? David had this powerful friend in Jehovah 
his God. So perfect was his trust, so full his assurance that God 
both could and , would defend him and bear him through every 
peril, that when God spread his table in the face of his savage 
enemies, he ate his bread in quietness and confidence, as if en- 
folded within strong and loving arms where no harm could reach 

him. "Thou anointest my head with oil." The original word 

shows that this anointing was festive and not official ; i. e., such 
as was practiced at feasts and on joyous occasions, and not the 
sacred ceremony of induction into the office of High Priest or 
King. David would say that this table was not a dry crust, 
seized in haste and terror by one trembling with dread of ene- 
mies ; but was a real banquet, good enough for a king, where his 
faithful God ["thou"] stood by to break the alabaster box of 
precious ointment and pour it on his head as he sat at meat ! As 
an illustration of this usage the reader will recall the case given 

by Luke. (7: 37) or by Mark (14: 3). "My cup runneth over," 

full to overflowing; or as the Hebrew has it more precisely, is 
abundance itself. So Paul assures his Philippian converts 
(4: 19): " My God shall supply all your need according to his 
riches in glory by Christ Jesus." 

6. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the 
days of my life : and I will dwell in the house of the 
Lord forever. 

Such experiences in the past inspire these assurances in the future. 



PSALM XXIV. 



107 



" His love in time past 
Forbids me to think, 
He '11. leave me at last 
In trouble to sink." 

The same great Jehovah who had "so signally befriended and 
succored him through all the perils of the past, might surely be 
trusted to stand by him with no less faithfulness and love through 

all future time. The Hebrew word translated "surely" more 

often means only, i. e., goodness and mercy only — nothing else — 
will follow me. The translation would be more accurate gram- 
matically if read: "Goodness and mercy will follow me all the 
days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord for- 
ever." He does not think of coercing, forcing, the manifestations 
of goodness and mercy, nor should the word "will" be made em- 
phatic. A simple future is all he aims to express. The Hebrew 

rendered "forever" is simply, "for length of days — for a long 
time." 

PSALM XXIV. 

The occasion and date of this Psalm must be inferred from its 
contents. The historical details may be seen 2 Sam. 6 ; a passage 
which puts strongly the current idea of our Psalm — "to bring up 
the ark of God whose name is called by the name of The Lord of 
Hosts that dwelleth between the cherubims.' 1 In a Psalm com- 
posed to be sung on this occasion, it was eminently fit that God 
should be placed before the people, (1) in all his infinite majesty 
and glory; (2) in his spotless purity and holiness. The former 
qualities are seen best in his creatorship— in the glory of the 
worlds he has built and evermore sustains ; while the latter, as- 
sumed to be perfect, gives the utmost force to the question, Who 
shall come up into the place where this Holy God dwelleth ? Who 

may hope for his favor and blessing? Precisely these are the 

points which open this Psalm and prepare for the solemn inaugu- 
ration of the sacred Presence among his people in the holy hill of 
Zion. 

1. The earth is the Lord's, and the fullness thereof ; 
the world, and they that dwell therein. 

2. For he hath founded it upon the seas, and established 
it upon the floods. ■ 

The earth is the Lord's by the sovereign right of Creatorship — 
the right to a thing which we intuitively recognize as resting in 
him that made it. This right covers the earth and all that fills it ; 
the inhabited world and all that dwell therein. The Hebrew for 
" world" means the earth considered as productive and inhabited — 
the fitting abode of man. In using the word " upon the seas," 



108 



PSALM XXIV. 



" upon the floods, our translators seem to have assumed that the 
Psalmist and with him the ancient Hebrews thought of the entire 
earth as reposing upon a base of waters. I am not aware of any 
satisfactory evidence that they held this opinion. The Hebrew 
word used here by no means demands this construction, for it 
equally well admits the sense of above; he fixed it above the seas ; 
he made it firm above the floods. This is in harmony with the 
Mosaic records and with the demands of geological science. God 
gathered together (Gen. 1 : 9, 10) the surface waters that were in- 
undating the solid globe, elevating the land above those waters and 
making it firm in this position, saying to the waters: "Hitherto 
shalt thou come but no further; and here shall thy proud waves 
be stayed" (Job 38: 11). The language of poetry should be ex- 
pected to differ somewhat from the language of natural science. 
In the former God gathers together the waters and holds them to 
their place by his high command ; in the latter he simply upheaves 
the solid crust of the earth and leaves the forces of gravitation to 
hold the mighty waters to their assigned bed. The proposed end 
is gained — a habitable earth prepared for the abode of man — a 
world made by its infinite Creator and forever held by him in his 
sovereign right as both its Maker and its Lord. Creatorship re- 
veals and affirms his infinite dignity and glory, and asserts his 
claim to the grateful, adoring homage of his intelligent creatures. 

3. "Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord ? or who 
shall stand in his holy place ? 

Assuming that this Great God who built the worlds is to take 
his abode upon the holy hill of Zion, the Psalmist's mind abruptly 
turns to the grave and solemn inquiry : " Who of all the sons of 
men shall ascend into this holy hill? Who shall stand before a 
God so glorious and so pure, in his holy place ? " Familiar with 
the Mosaic worship at the tabernacle, David would naturally 
think of two classes: (1) Those who should abide in the holy 
hill, the priests and the Levites permanently located there ; and 
(2) those who out of all the tribes should go up to the holy hill 
at their great annual festivals and other stated solemnities to 
worship there before the God of Israel. It was for every reason 
most pertinent that he should labor to impress both these classes 
with a sense of the holiness and purity of the Great God, and 
lead them to inquire solemnly, Who is worthy to ascend this holy 
hill and dwell in this sacred Presence ? 

4. He that hath clean hands, and a pure heart ; who 
hath not lifted up his soul unto vanity, nor sworn deceit- 
fully. 

5. He shall receive the blessing from the Lord, and 
righteousness from the God of" his salvation. 

6. This is the generation of them that seek him, that 
seek thy face, O Jacob. Selah. 



PSALM XXIV. 



103 



Forthwith he answers his own question, resting his answer on 
principles which are most obvious and which commend themselves 
to every man's conscience: The pure in heart and they only shall 
see God. They who would stand before the Holy One must be 
themselves clean of hands and pure of heart, for he abhors ini- 
quity. The precise sense of the phrase, " To lift up the soul 

unto vanity " is not very obvious, either in this English version or 
in the Hebrew. The same verb and preposition occur elsewhere 
only in the third commandment — "Thou shalt not take the name 
of God in vain" — literally, to take up the name to vanity. But 
the same verb and noun with an analogous but not identical prep- 
osition occur somewhat frequently ; e. g., Ps. 25 : 1 : " Unto thee do 
I lift up my soul." Also Deut. 24: 15 : "At his day thou shalt 

five him (thy hired servant) his hire, for he is poor and setieth his 
cart upon it; " i. e., lifteth up his heart to it. (See also Ps. 86 : 4, 
and 143: 8, and Hos. 4: 8, and Prov. 19 : 18.) The choice seems 
to lie between the general sense of bringing the soul into contact 
with, and the more specific one, exciting the sensibilities toward 
an object, lifting the heart toward it — with a preponderance of 

probability for the latter.- The word " vanity" is used for things 

vain and empty ; also for things false and for idols ; and is perhaps 
used comprehensively for sin. The man described here, therefore, 
is he who has not given his heart in love to any sin. He shall 
receive blessings — literally shall lift up blessings from the Lord, 
with a play upon the same word in the previous clause, thus : He 
who has not lifted up his soul [in love] to sin, shall lift up [and 
bear away] blessings from the Lord, " even righteousness " — favor, 

acceptance from the God who saves him. This describes the 

character and the consequent reward of the whole class [" gener- 
ation "] who heartily seek the Lord. But we can not follow our 

English translation precisely in supposing the face sought to be 
that of Jacob. Both the nature of the case and the drift of the 
context compel us to think only of the face of God. It is better, 
therefore, to put the word " Jacob " in apposition with those who 
seek, thus: This is the generation of those who seek thy face — 
the real Jacob — in the same sense in which the scriptures speak 
of the true Israel: "They are not all Israel who are of Israel," 
but only they who are "Israelites indeed in whom is no guile." 

See Rom. 9 : 6, and John 1 : 47. On an occasion like this it was 

specially pertinent to impress the sentiment that none could hope 
for the favor of the Great and Holy God save such as came before 
him pure in heart and hand ; humbly seeking his face in the spirit 
of his true and sincere worshipers. 

7. Lift up your heads, O ye gates ; and be ye lifted up, 
ye everlasting doors ; and the King of glory shall come in. 

8. Who is this King of glory ? The Lord strong and 
mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. 

If, as many critics suppose, this Psalm was written to be sung 



110 



PSALM XXV. 



as the national procession were advancing -with the ark to place it 
within the sacred tabernacle on the hill of Zion, then at this point 
they have reached the tabernacle, and now address the ancient 
gates, calling upon them to lift themselves up that the Glorious 
King may enter. [These gates were tent-curtains, not doors on 

hinges, opened therefore by being " lifted up."] These doors 

were called u everlasting," L e., ancient, not on account of the an- 
tiquity of this particular tent which David himself had prepared 
[" in the midst of the tent that David had pitched for it," 2 Sam. 
6 : 17], but with reference to the original tent constructed long 
before in the wilderness, of which this was essentially a reproduc- 
tion, and possibly in some of its parts the same. The ' ; King of 

glory" means simply the glorious King. The conception, 

" mighty in battle," comes from the life and character of that age — 
a militant age and church, in long and bloody conflict with hostile 
nations. This glorious King had shown himself to be " mighty to 
save " those who went forth to battle with faith in his arm. 

9. Lift up your heads, O ye gates ; even lift them up, ye 
everlasting doors ; and the King of glory shall come in. 

10. Who is this King of glory ? The Loed of hosts, 
he is the King of glory. Selah. 

The repetition here is exquisitely pertinent and beautiful, this 

being the great central idea of the song. It has been a favorite 

theory with some critics that not only this Psalm but many others 
were sung with responsive choirs, one party singing the question 
and another the answer. AYe know too little in regard to the mu- 
sical performances of the Hebrews to affirm or deny very positively 
on this point. It is easy to say that in this Psalm such a mode 
would have been very impressive. But if this usage had been 
common, it is scarcely credible that there should have been no 
other Psalm but this adapted to the responsive method. A single 
case of this sort is too small a base to support so great a super- 
structure as the theory in question. And it is not difficult to 
account for the special form of this one on the ground of bold 
personification and rhetorical force and beauty. 

• PSALM XXV. 

The ark being now installed in its place on Mt Zion, the time is 
specially appropriate for the revival or rather the reorganization 
of the public worship of the sanctuary, with a much larger place 
assigned to sacred song than ever before. The responsibility and 
labor of preparing these songs for the sanctuary devolved specially 
upon David. Remarkably we find here a series (25-29), five in 
number, which, judging from their general scope as well as from 
several special points, seem to have been suggested by the scenes 



PSALM XXV. 



Ill 



of Ps. 24, and written under the impulse of those scenes. They 
arc fragrant with the spirit of true worship, with longing desires 
to be taught of God in every right way, as a means of securing 
his favor ; with expressions of trust ; with prayers for help ; with 
thanksgiving for mercies, and with ascriptions of honor and glory 

to the ever-glorious God. This Psalm, with slight irregularities, 

is an acrostic ; the successive verses beginning with the successive 
letters of the Hebrew alphabet. This arrangement was designed 
probably to aid the memory. 

1. Unto thee, O Lord, do I lift up my soul. 

Taking this verse as the key-note of the Psalm, and therefore 
expressing comprehensively its main ideas, we shall see that it 
covers essentially the whole field of prayer and communion with 
God — the soul lifted up to him in prayerful trust for protection 
against enemies, in supplication for divine guidance into all truth 
and duty, giving moreover a large place to prayer for the pardon 
of sin and for constant preservation from its approaches and 
temptations. No language could more perfectly express the con- 
stant experience of the Christian heart. O my God, I lift up my 
soul continually, imploringly, trustfully, unto thee. In sorrow or 
in joy; in straitened or in large places; in sickness or in health; 
what time " all these things are against me," or what time all goes 
well — alike always and every-where, thou art my friend, my hope, 
my joy; therefore my heart looks evermore unto thee. 

2. O my God, I trust in thee : let me not be ashamed, 
let not mine enemies triumph over me. 

3. Yea, let none that wait on thee be ashamed : let them 
be ashamed which transgress without cause. 

The being "ashamed" or rather being put to shame, implies 
that his expected help from God foils him and he therefore stands 
confounded before his enemies as when one trusts in an arm of help 
that proves too weak to aiford the help needed. In such a result 
David knew that his enemies would exult over him— an exultation 
that would be at once mortifying if not also disastrous to himself, 
and dishonorable to God. A case in point will make this clear. 
David went forth against Goliath of Gath (1 Sam. 17) in the pres- 
ence of both armies — those of Israel and those of the "aliens," 
proclaiming, "I come out to meet thee in the name of the Lord 
of Hosts whom thou hast defied. This day will the Lord deliver 
thee into mine hands, and all this assembly shall know that the 
Lord saveth not with sword or spear; and he will give you into 
our hands" (vs. 45-47). Now what if the Lord had failed him 
in this emergency. Such a failure however is not to be thought 
of so long as the youthful David is in his place prayerful 
and trusting, his soul lifted up to the Lord only. Therefore it is 
never superflous to pray, "O my God, I trust in thee; let me not 
be ashamed; let not mine enemies exult over me." Not im- 



112 



PSALM XXV. 



probably David is giving us here the precise experiences of his 
soul in that eventful hour when he marched forth against the 
proud Philistine. Noticeably he shapes this song and prayer, not 
for his own use alone but for all : Let none that wait on thee be 
ashamed; but let this shame of disappointment be the lot of those 
and those only who are treacherously, inexcusably wicked. The 
verb here used comprises the several ideas of treachery, wicked- 
ness, and violence. 

4. Show me thy ways, O Lord ; teach me thy paths. 

5. Lead me in thy truth, and teach me : for thou art the 
God of my salvation ; on thee do I wait all the day. 

" Thy ways," in an address to God, may mean either the ways 
in which God himself walks, or the ways in which he would have 
his people walk. The course of thought in this connection favors 
the latter view, thus : Teach me how to walk so as to please thee. 
Cause me to walk in thy truth, i. e., in precisely the ways which 
thou shalt reveal, that I may not err at all from thy precepts, for 
I depend on thee alone for my salvation, and I know that this de- 
pendence is wholly in vain unless I am guided in a holy life by 

thine unerring wisdom and by thy good Spirit. " On thee do I 

wait all the day" — not through the day only as opposed to the 
night; not through one day in distinction from many; but con- 
stantly, all the time. 

6. Eemember, O Lord, thy tender mercies and thy lov- 
ing kindnesses ; for they have been ever of old. 

7. Remember not the sins of my youth, nor my trans- 
gressions: according to thy mercy remember thou me for 
thy goodness' sake, O Lord. 

When we consider how utterly impossible it is that the infinite 
mind of God should ever forget, or ever recall to mind things for 
a time out of his thought, we may get some sense of that con- 
descending accommodation to our limited capacities under which 
God allows us to speak to him according to our human ideas, or 
after the manner of men with men. In these verses the Psalmist 
prays God to remember one class of things, and not to remember 
certain other things. Very appropriately too, for it is simply call- 
ing the divine attention to these points and beseeching him to 
think of his tender mercies which he has constantly manifested 
through all the ages past ; and next that he would not remember 
against him the sins of his youth, but blot them from his book of 
remembrance and fully forgive. What is prayer in any possible 
case but calling the attention of our Great Father to our wants, 
reminding him as the case may be of his promises and resting 
our plea on his revealed mercy and goodness — " for thy goodness' 
sake, 0 Lord?" 

8. Good and upright is the Lord : therefore will he 
teach sinners in the way. 



PSALM XXV. 



113 



9. The meek will he guide in judgment: and the meek 
will he teach his way. 

Ai*e these "sinners" godless men, in all their sins, and is this a 
promise that God will lead them to himself if they will seek from 
him such leading ; or are they converted but yet imperfect, erring 
men whom the Lord will guide into better ways of living ? The 
latter seems to me most probably the sense. It is manifestly the 
sense of the parallel clause that follows (v. 9): "The meek" i. e., 
the humble as opposed to the proud of heart, " he will guide in 
ways that please him." The first construction above named 
yields a meaning that is most true and precious ; but not for that 
reason necessarily the truth before the mind here. 

10. All the paths of the Lord are mercy and truth unto 
such as keep his covenant and his testimonies. 

Sentiment: We may be very sure that God will teach his erring 
but penitent people all the ways of life that please him, for his 
own ways of dealing with them are wholly merciful and truthful, 

i. e., are infinitely kind and faithful to his covenant. The 

"paths of the Lord" are here his own ways of dealing with his 
covenant people. 

11. For thy name's sake, O Lord, pardon mine iniquity; 
for it is great. 

In the phrase, " for thy name's sake," the nature of God, his 
attributes of character, are really expressed under the word 
"name." The force of the plea therefore as used in prayer is that 
on the ground of his infinite love, pity, compassion, he would show 

mercy in this particular case. Yet another ground is named for 

the request, " pardon mine iniquit}'," in the words, "for it is great." 
What is great ? Either thy name, i. <?., thy manifested love and 
faithfulness, or my sin. The former is the more remote antecedent, 
the latter the nearer one, and therefore probably the true one. 
Either would be a just ground of plea in this prayer. In the lat- 
ter case thus : For I confess my sin before thee ; I am exceedingly 
guilty ; I can not live before thee, this sin remaining unforgiven ; 
1 beseech thee, therefore, blot out this my great sin ! 

12. What man is he that feareth the Lord ? him shall 
he teach in the way that he shall choose. 

13. His soul shall dwell at ease ; and his seed shall in- 
herit the earth. 

The original is abrupt, yet expressive: "Who is this — the 
man fearing the Lord? Him he will teach in the way he 
shall choose," i. e., God will teach him in the way himself shall 
choose for his fearing servant. This "fear" is not a servile 

dread, but a filial, obedient regard. His soul shall abide in 

prosperity (not mere personal " ease"); "his seed" — his children 



114 



PSALM XXY. 



after liim — "shall inherit," not the whole world, but "the land" — 
the. promised Canaan. During all the ages, from Abraham to 
Joshua, this was a "land of promise," fraught with glowing at- 
tractions to the exiled people in Egypt and to their wandering 
sons and daughters in the great Arabian desert. Hence the 
phrase, "inherit the land," came into current use to signify all 
the most valued and best things of earth. 

14. The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him; 
and he will show them his covenant. 

The word translated "secret"* means primarily a sitting 
together; then the persons so sitting, constituting a circle or con- 
gregation; then a group of persons in consultation, involving the 
natural concomitant — intimacy, friendship, free interchange of 
thought and sympathy. These uses of the word may be seen in 
Ps. I'll: 1, and 64: 3, and 55: 15, and Prov. 15: 22, and Gen. 
49 : 6, etc. The sense here is, God is the intimate friend of those 
who fear him — on terms of intimacy, endearment, sympathy, 
counsel. The parallel clause seems to mean — his covenant is to 
give them knowledge, to teach them, i. e., all they need to know. 
This explains his relation to them. It is not that of equals mutu- 
ally dependent on each other, but of one mind infinitely superior 
to the other and therefore in covenant to impart to the inferior all 

needful knowledge and aid. This sense must be preferred to 

that of our received version because the collocation of the Hebrew 
words, the Masoretic punctuation and the parallelism combine to 
sustain it. The reader will notice with interest that this mean- 
ing harmonizes remarkably with the genius of the new covenant 
as it stands in Jer. 31 : 31-34, and Heb. 8: 8-11. "I will put my 
laws into their mind and write them in their heart, . . . and 
all shall know me from the least to the greatest." The germ of 
this new covenant is in the passage before us. What can be more 
precious ? 

15. Mine eyes are ever toward the Lord ; for he shall 
pluck my feet out of the net. 

Such a friend may be relied on both to perceive all our personal 
dangers, and to pluck our feet out from every snare. Therefore 
let our waiting eye be evermore toward him for such friendly aid. 

16. Turn thee unto me, and have mercy upon me ; for I 
am desolate and afflicted. 

17. The troubles of my heart are enlarged: O bring 
thou me out of my distresses. 

18. Look upon mine affliction and my pain ; and forgive 
all my sins. 

As mine eye is ever toward thee, so, I pray, let thine eye turn 



PSALM XXVI. 



115 



unto me, for I am solitary, lonely, with no other capable friend to 
relieve and aid me ; and I am weak (the sense of the word ren- 
dered "afflicted"); I am powerless to relieve myself; therefore 

hasten thou to my relief. It is doubly painful that a sense of 

sin toward God should blend itself with countless other sorrows 
and trials, so that with every prayer for help must be mingled a 
cry for pardon of sin. But such is Christian experience, the 
purest joy of which is evermore that our Father above is plenteous 
in mercy and loves to blot out the sins of his penitent, believing 
people. 

19. Consider mine enemies ; for the} r are many ; and they 
hate me with cruel hatred. 

20. O keep my soul, and deliver me : let me not be 
ashamed ; for I put my trust in thee. 

In the translation " consider," our English version fails to pre- 
sent the beautiful correspondence which appears in the original : 
"Look upon mine affliction" (v. 18); "look [also] upon mine en- 
emies :" let thine e.ye turn in like manner both ways — toward my 
sufferings, and toward the number, malignity, and cruelty of my foes. 

21. Let integrity and uprightness preserve me ; for I 
wait on thee. 

A consciousness of integrity and uprightness in his relations to 
his enemies is quite consistent with such a sense of sin toward God 

as is implied in his prayer for pardon (v. 18). These words need 

not be pressed to imply that in his view his integrity and upright- 
ness were to be themselves a preserving power, all-sufficient for 
his protection; but only that inasmuch as his life had been in the 
main upright, he may, without presumption, pray that God would 
protect and deliver him. The Psalmist's doctrine on this point is 

developed in Ps. 18 : 20-26. " I wait on thee ; " wait at thy door ; 

lay my case at thy feet and trust thee to hear my prayer. 

22. Eedeem Israel, O God, out of all his troubles. 

Thus the Psalm closes with a prayer for all, in which all Israel 

may unite. It is not important that we know what particular 

troubles were then pressing upon the Israel of God, whether from 
foreign enemies or domestic ; from jealousies between the tribes or 
from growing prosperity. The prayer is good for every form of 
trouble, in every nation, for the church in all ages, because God is 
evermore the Refuge and Hope of his people, their Redeemer from 
all their troubles. 

PSALM XXVI. 

This Psalm sustains close relations to the two that precede, as 
also to the three that follow. Its key-note was struck in v. 21 of 



116 



PSALM XXVI. 



the Psalm preceding : " Let integrity and uprightness preserve me ; 
for I wait on thee." The writer thinks of his relations to the 
wicked — how he has carefully kept aloof from their society, 
abhorred their principles, and diligently sought to walk in the 
fear of God and in the love of his name. 

1. Judge me, O Lord ; for I have walked in mine integ- 
rity: I have trusted also in the Loed ; therefore I shall not 
slide. 

2. Examine me, O Loed, and prove me ; try my reins 
and my heart. 

Conscious of general integrity, he appeals to God to search and 

try his very heart, his deepest thoughts and purposes. " Shall 

not slide," but shall have a firm footing, a sure standing, God being 
his strength and support continually. 

3. For thy loving-kindness is before mine eyes: and I 
have walked in thy truth. 

The connection of thought may be this : my upright life has been 
sustained by a pious heart and by a sense of thy love and faithful- 
ness. I have sought to walk in all thy truth. A present and 
gracious God, my guide and refuge, has held me to my purpose of 
thorough integrity in all my relations, both to men and to God. 

4. I have not sat with vain persons, neither will I go in 
with dissemblers. 

5. I hated the congregation of evil doers ; and will not 
sit with the wicked. 

To "sit with the wicked" is to be intimate in their society, in 
sympathy with their spirit and life. From such associations the 
Tsalmist has kept himself. See his description of the righteous 

man in Ps. 1 : " Dissemblers," strictly, men of concealed 

purpose, who cover their designs from public view, as if conscious 
of being too mean and wicked to make it pleasant to be known as 
they are. Therefore they are constantly contriving to appear to 
be what they are not. 

6. I will wash mine hands in innocency : so will I com- 
pass thine altar, O Loed : 

7. That I may publish with the voice of thanksgiving, 
and tell of all thy wondrous works. 

8. Loed, I have loved the habitation of thy house, and 
the place where thine honor dwelleth. 

Obviously the question is still before his mind, u Who shall 
ascend into the hill of the Lord ? Who shall dwell in his holy place ? 
tie that hath clean hands," etc. (24 : 3, 4). The ark is now located 
on Mt. Zion, and public worship is revived there with fresh solemni- 



PSALM XXVII. 



117 



ties. Hence the pertinence of this song.- David seems to recall 

the great deliverances wrought for him since his call to the throne, 
up to this inauguration of the sacred ark on the hill of Zion, and 
is reminded of his manifold occasions for thanksgiving. Has not 
he loved the dwelling-place of his God, the house where his visible 
glory reposes above the mercy-seat between the cherubims ? " Thy 
honor" is precisely that visible glory* called in later times the 
"Shechinah." 

9. Gather not my soul with sinners, nor my life with 
bloody men : 

10. In whose hands is mischief, and their right hand is 
full of bribes. 

As his heart repels all sympathy with the wicked and he keeps 
himself entirely aloof from their society, so he prays that he may 
be severed from them in their lot as God's enemies, both here 
and hereafter. 

11. But as for me, I will walk in mine integrity: redeem 
me, and be merciful unto me. 

12. My foot standeth in an even place : in the congrega- 
tions will I bless the Lord. 

Putting himself in the strongest contrast with them, he renews 
and re-asserts his purpose of personal integrity, and upon this, 
bases a renewed prayer for redemption and mercy, coupled with 
an expressed assurance of a safe standing, on an even and solid 
surface, in beautiful antithesis with the sliding foot to which he 
alludes in v. 1. 

PSALM XXVII. 

While the experiences recorded in this Psalm are entirely ap- 
propriate to the case of David, yet there is nothing so peculiar to 
him as not to express also the heart-experiences of other saints 
without number. We may suppose it to have been written about 
the time of the revival of public worship at the tabernacle after 
the ark was set up there as in Ps. 24 ; and David began to feel the 
importance of providing suitable songs for the service of the sanc- 
tuary. Most naturally he would draw first from the rich stores 
of his own personal experience, as here. 

1. The Lord is my light and my salvation ; whom shall 
I fear ? the Lord is the strength of my life ; of whom 
shall I be afraid ? 

" My light," my luminary, my Sun, who throws light and joy 



0 



118 



PSALM XXVII. 



on my path and on my heart also. As darkness is the standing 
symbol of calamity and consequent sorrow, and as an opaque 
body that should eclipse all light and beget darkness and gloom 
would be a word for whatever was fearful and to be deprecated, 
so to call God " my light " is to say, he is my perpetual joy who 

makes all my life-path cheerful and blessed. "My salvation, " 

my constant Savior, so mighty to save that I may well ask in 
triumph — With such a Savior, whom need I fear ? 

2. When the wicked, even mine enemies and my foes, 
came upon me to eat up my flesh, they stumbled and fell. 

" Came down upon me to eat up my flesh," like cannibals, with 
savage ferocity. The original makes the word " they " emphatic, 
in the sense : It was they, not I that stumbled and fell. This 
was because God was his "salvation" and "the strength of his 
life." 

3. Though a host should encamp against me, my heart 
shall not fear : though war should rise against me, in this 
vrUl I be confident. 

The Hebrew usage of making nouns from their verbs enables 
them to say as here: Though a crowd should crowd upon or a 
camp should encamp against me. Of course this is in the hostile 

sense. In this emergency [of war] I will still trust, i. e., in 

God, my light and my salvation. 

4. One thing I have desired of the Lord, that will I seek 
after ; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the 
days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to 
inquire in his temple. 

Such were David's thoughts and feelings when driven from the 
sanctuary by the persecutions of Saul. To be an exile from the 
place and the home of the glorious divine Presence was the bit- 
terest of his trials. One thing, therefore, above all other things, 
his soul longed for, viz. : that he might dwell all his days in the 
house of the Lord. Most expressively does he put the reason of 
this one desire — that he might behold the loveliness of Israel's 
God, might witness the manifestations of his love and grace as 
made in his earthly temple and be there evermore to inquire after 
God and gain new light as to his character and will. Here we 
can see why David should be designated as " the man after God's 
own heart" (1 Sam. 13: 14, and Acts 13: 23), for does not God 
love to see the face of those who so ardently long to see him that 

they may learn and do all his will ? The spirit of this verse 

made David the " Sweet Psalmist of Israel" (2 Sam. 23: 1) who 
could write songs of Zion out of a full and overflowing heart. 

5. For in the time of trouble he shall hide me in his pa- 



PSALM XXVII. 



119 



vilion : in the secret of his tabernacle shall he hide me ; he 
shall set rne upon a rock. 

6. And now shall mine head be lifted up above mine 
enemies round about me : therefore will I offer in his tab- 
ernacle sacrifices of joy ; I will sing, yea, I will sing praises 
unto the Lord. 

David's personal history during the long interval between his 
being anointed prospective king of Israel and the death of Saul 
suffices to show why protection against enemies should be made 
so prominent among the blessings for which he gives thanks to 

God. "Pavilion" is the usual name for the booth or tent in 

which nomadic tribes reside — the house of the Arabs of the desert. 

In' the secrecy of his tent he will secrete me (Heb.). -"Set me 

high upon a rock," conceives of a mountain crag, high above the 

reach of the missile weapons of ancient warfare. " Sacrifices 

of joy " is literally of shouting, such as were offered with loud ex- 
pressions of joyful thanksgiving. With all his ardent soul David 
will bless the Lord and sing his praises for these great deliver- 
ances wrought for him by the God of his solvation. 

7. Hear, O Lord, when I cry with my voice: have 
mercy also upon me, and answer me. 

Though he has now reached the throne, he still needs help 
from the same Deliverer. Former mercies only encourage him to 
apply afresh for new and still needed blessings. How can he 
ever live without God ? 

8. When thou saidst, Seek ye my face ; my heart said unto 
thee, Thy face, Lord, will I seek. 

Our received version gives the general sense, but fails to give 
its nicer shades. The order of the words in the original is : As 
to Thee, my heart said. Seek ye my face : thy face, Lord, will 
I seek. The sense I take to be that his heart says both the sub- 
sequent clauses ; the first in musing recollection, turning over and 
over those hopeful and precious words of the Lord ; the second in 
earnest and warm response to his kind invitation. Remembering 
how the Lord had said (e. g., Deut. 4: 29), "Thfcu shalt find him 
if thou seek him with all thy heart and with all thy soul," and 
musing thoughtfully on these words, my heart responded : So will 
I indeed seek the Lord with all my soul! Such is the expe- 
rience of those who seek and find God. Their aching heart 
seizes upon some precious words of divine invitation and promise ; 
they think of them as the words of God ; and then their heart 
goes out in trustful, grateful response — " Thy face, Lord, will I 
seek." 

9. Hide not thy face far from me ; put not thy servant 
away in anger : thou hast been my help ; leave me not, 
neither forsake me, O God of my salvation. 



120 



PSALM XXVII. 



10. When my father and my mother forsake me, then 
the Lord will take me up. 

Most appropriately this responsive resolve is followed by 
prayer which presents in various forms the great central wants of 
the soul — the divine mercy and its conscious manifestations. I 
seek thy face ; hide it not from my sight ; thrust me not away in 
anger, greatly as I deserve it; thou hast been my help: but I 
need more help still, and gather courage from past mercies to re- 
new and perpetuate my requests. Though father and mother 
(representing all earthly friends) forsake me, still the Lord will 
gather me among his children, for his parental loving-kindness 

faileth not. The usage of the Hebrew word which I have 

rendered "gather" appears Josh. 20: 4, and Judg. 19: 15, in the 
sense of taking into one's house or city for hospitable entertain- 
ment and protection. Probably we need not assume that 

David's father and mother did in fact forsake him. On this point 
it is rather a supposed case. 

11. Teach me thy»way, O Lord, and lead me in a plain 
path, because of mine enemies. 

12. Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies : 
for false witnesses are risen up against me, and such as 
breathe out cruelty. 

Knowing well that if he would have the Lord his Deliverer, 
he must walk in ways that please him, and withal must really love 
the ways of his perfect law. he prays, " Teach me thy way. 1 ' 
Also, " Lead me in an even, smooth way," as opposed to a rough 
one in which his enemies might destroy him. He knew but too well 
that they sought his death, and that some of them were malicious 
enough to effect this by false accusation. The history (1 Sam. 
22 : 9) gives us the case of Doeg the Edomite, and of Shimei 
(2 Sam. 16: 7, 8). The known desire of Saul would raise up 
wicked men in abundance to gratify his revenge by wily efforts to 
ruin David. "Breathing out cruelty" strongly represents it as fill- 
ing their wicked hearts and flowing out spontaneously as their 
breath. Compare Acts 9 : 1. 

13. I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the good- 
ness of the Lord in the land of the living. 

The omission in the original of any words for the idea, " I had 
fainted" is so unusual and remarkable that some copies omit the 
word for "unless" and the rest mark it heavily with dots to call 
special attention to it. The full expression of the sense requires 
some such words : I should have sunk down in despair — should 
have lost all hope and heart. Probably David's eye is on those 
bitter years of trial which lay between his call to the throne and 
his being seated upon it — years during which the word of the Lord, 



PSALM XXVIII. 



121 



by his prophet Samuel (1 Sam. 16: 1-13), held him to high antici- 
pations, and at the same time involved him in critical exigencies 
and fierce persecutions which sometimes put his faith to the 
sharpest test and made him long for some resting place, exempt 
from such peril. All through those sharpest trials he tells us here 
that he still believed he should yet see the goodness of Jehovah, 
his faithful God, in the land of the living. 

14. Wait on the Lord : be of good courage, and lie shall 
strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord. 

Upon his own personal experience he rests this exhortation : 
Let every heart sorely tried with "hope long deferred" take 
courage and wait on the Lord. For his comfort and strength let 
him know that if he will gird his own soul with hope and courage, 
God will minister to his strength of faith and endurance of soul. 
Therefore let him wait on the Lord for the help his faith needs as 
well as for the ultimate realization of his hopes. 

PSALM XXVIII. 

The scope of this Psalm suggests its being classed with the 
three next preceding, all composed by David for the public 
worship of the sanctuary near the time of the location of the 
ark on Zion and the introduction of a more ample service of 
song. The allusion (v. 2) to "lifting up my hand toward thy 
holy oracle" implies the presence of the ark in its sacred tent, 
while the allusion (v. 8) to "his anointed" contemplates David as 
now on Ins throne. The experiences developed here though 
primarily those of David personally are yet appropriate to all the 
pious worshipers of his time, and indeed, for the most part, of all 
time. 

1. Unto thee will I cry, O Lord my rock ; be not silent 
to me : lest, if thou be silent to me, »I become like them 
that go down into the pit. 

"My Rock," equivalent to my sure support, my Refuge and 
Protector. In those times the rock was thought of, not merely as 
a foundation to build on, or a thing immovable, but also as a mili- 
tary tower of defense, a lofty and secure place of safety. " Turn 

not away in silence from me," without answering my prayer. The 
preposition before "me" seems to demand this additional idea of 
turning away. The verb gives the sense to be silent If God should 
thus turn away from his prayer in silence, he would be like dying- 
men, helpless and hopeless. 

2. Hear the voice of my supplications, when I cry unto 
thee, when I lift up my hands toward thy holy oracle. 



122 



PSALM XXVIII. 



Lifting up the hand, significant of lifting up the heart to God, 
is the attitude of prayer. May it not also be the attitude of wait- 
ing to receive from God the blessing sought? As examples, the 
reader will readily recall the case of Moses (Ex. 9 : 29, 33, and 
17 : 11, 12) ; and of Solomon in his prayer at the dedication of 

the temple (1 Kings 8: 22, 38); and of Ezra (9: 5). "Oracle" 

is one of the names for the most holy place where the visible glory 
[the Shechinah] reposed on the cover of the ark beneath the 
cherubim. The Hebrew word* comes from a verb f which is used 
abundantly in the sense to speak, and hence might most naturally 
mean the place from which God spake to his people. This cor- 
responds so perfectly with the historic facts respecting the inner 
sanctuary — the place where God spake with Moses — as to leave 
little room to question the origin and significance of this name. 
God said to Moses (Ex. 25 : 22) : " Thou shalt put the mercy-seat 
above the ark and there will I meet with thee and I will commune 
with thee from above the mercy-seat," etc. After the dedication 
of the sacred tent, it is recorded (Num. 7: 89) that when Moses 
had gone into the tabernacle of the congregation to speak with 
him [God], then he heard the voice of one speaking unto him from 
off the mercy-seat that was upon the ark of the testimony from 
between the two cherubims, etc. The same name ("oracle") was 
given to the same position amid the same surroundings, in the 

temple of Solomon (1 Kings 6 : 19, 20). Dismissing from the 

mind the heathenish associations of this word, it becomes a per- 
tinent name for the location of that visible glory of God in the 
inner sanctuary toward which the pious Israelite was directed to 
look in prayer and from which in some cases even an audible 
response was heard from the Lord himself. The German Lexi- 
cons [of Gesenius and Fuerst] give this word the sense of the 
hinder or rear part of the sacred tent or temple, which was the 
location of the most Holy place. 

3. Draw me not away with the wicked, and with the 
workers of iniquity, which speak peace to their neighbors, 
but mischief is in their hearts. 

"Draw me not away*" seems to mean drag me not down with 
the wicked to their deserved doom ; spare me from their fearful 
lot. Let me not be numbered with them. 

4. Give them according to their deeds, and according to 
the wickedness of their endeavors : give them after the 
work of their hands ; render to them their desert. 

5. Because they regard not the works of the Lord : nor 
the operation of his hands, he shall destroy them, and not 
build them up. 

The Psalmist is far indeed from pleading with God not to give 



PSALM XXVIII. 



123 



them the lot they deserve. On the contrary while praying to be 
himself spared from their lot, his descriptive view of their awful 
wickedness impresses him with their righteous desert of a most 

fearful retribution ; Therefore let them have their deserts ! It is 

well to mark carefully the reasons why they so richly deserve this 
doom, viz.: because when they might see God they will not: when 
they might study the works of his hand and the retributions of his 
providence and might by such means learn his wisdom, justice, 
power, and love, they will not regard these works of his — will give 
no thougjit to their moral lessons — will neither know, love, or 
obey the Great God! Therefore God will tear them down and 
not build them up — a figure which conceives of them as a house 

or a castle — not to be made more firm but to be overthrown. 

Paul gives the same reason for the condemnation of the godless 
heathen: "Because when they knew God they did not glorify him 
as God" (Rom. 1: 21); i. e., in so far as they did know him, 
they withheld from him due honor and obedience ; and because 
they might, but would not, know him more, and would not give 

him the honor they knew to be his due.- Isaiah has the same 

words (5 : 12) of the wicked who give themselves up to thoughtless 
and thought-killing revelry, utterly reckless of God and of all his 

manifestations of himself in his works. It should be carefully 

noted that this doom is not pronounced on beings who have in 
their created constitution no capacity for knowing God ; nor are 
they condemned for not knowing an unrevealed God — one who has 
neither said or done any thing by which they might know him. 
On the contrary, the wicked men of our world have both the 
capacity and the means of knowing God their Maker and Father. 
Therefore " this is the condemnation, that light has come into the 
world and yet they have loved darkness rather than light because 
their deeds are evil." (John 3 : 19). Hence the obvious and per- 
fect justice of their doom. 

6. Blessed be the Lord, because he hath heard the voice 
of my supplications. 

7. The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart 
trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore my heart 
greatly rejoiceth ; and with my song will I praise him. 

This prayer heard and answered, is naturally that which next 
precedes — the very one then specially before the mind, viz., that 
God " would not draw him away with the wicked." Some precious 
witness of the Spirit (we may suppose) assured him that this 
prayer was answered, and therefore with all his soul and all his 
powers of song, he praises God. 

8. The Lord is their strength, and he is the saving 
strength of his anointed. 

9. Save thy people, and bless thine inheritance ; feed 
them also, and lift them up forever. 



124 



PSALM XXIX. 



" Their strength," i. e., of all his trustful people. "The sav- 
ing strength," literally, "the strength of salvations of his anointed" 
— a strength -which ensures ample salvation for his anointed king — 
a precious testimony which David bears for God as his own glori- 
ous Savior. Such assurances as to God's saving strength do not 

supersede prayer and render it needless, but rather open the way 
for prayer — which the Psalm improves: " Save thy people ; bless 
thine inheritance" — a people thine by covenant, fathers and sons 
through all their successive generations. " Feed them also," as a 
shepherd his flock, and continue to exalt them with thy blessings 
forever. 

PSALM XXIX. 

In common with Ps. 8 and 19, this Psalm shows that its author 
was familiar with the manifestations of God in nature, and was 
capable of quick and keen appreciation of their sublimity and 
glory. The moral application of the Psalm is exquisite. This 
Great God whose voice of thunder shakes the heavens and the 
earth, and whose majesty and power are so ineffably grand, gives 
his great strength to the saving of his people, and will surely bless 
them with all best prosperity. The more terrible he is to his foes 
the less his friends have to fear, for all that formidable power 
which strikes his foes with terror is sacred to the succor and salva- 
tion of his friends. Its subject precludes the idea of any special 

historic occasion. 

1. Give unto the Lord, O ye mighty, give unto the Lord 
glory and strength. 

"Give," not in the sense of impart, which is not to be thought 
of, but of ascribe, attribute, reverently acknowledging that these are 

qualities of the Great God. "O ye mighty" is in the original, 

"Ye sons of the mighty ones"* — a word which is used in the 
singular for God in the sense of the Mighty One. But in the 
plural it is never used of the Supreme God, but of the angels, as 
in Ps. 89 : 7 : " For who in the heaven can be compared unto the 
Lord ? Who among the sons of the mighty can be likened unto the 
Lord? The call here compares with that in Ps. 103: 20: "Bless 
the Lord, ye his angels that excel in strength," etc. 

2. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name ; 
worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness. 

"Worship," bow low before the Lord. "In the beauty of holi- 
ness," is thought by some to refer to the sacred vestments required 
by the Mosaic law — holy garments ; but there can be no objection 
to the vastly higher and more appropriate sense — in the moral 



PSALM XXIX. 



125 



beauty of a holy heart. This is indefinitely more in accordance 
with the strain of the Psalm. 

3. The voice of the Lord is upon the waters: the God 
of glory thundereth : the Loud is upon many waters. 

The "waters" and the "many waters" of this verse can not 
be the "great sea" of the Hebrews, the Mediterranean ; but must 
be that mass of waters supposed to be recumbent upon the firma- 
ment, gathered there (and ever after remaining) when in the pro- 
cess of creation God divided between the waters above and those 
beneath this firmament (Gen. 1 : 6-7). The Lord is conceived 
to sit upon these superincumbent waters, and the thunder which 
roars in the lofty clouds of heaven is thought of as his voice above 
this ocean of the heavens ! 

4. The voice of the Lord is powerful ; the voice of the 
Lord is full of majesty. 

This voice of the Lord is no doubt thunder — here declared to be 
both powerful and majestic. 

5. The voice of the Lord Ijreaketh the cedars ; yea, the 
Lord breaketh the cedars of Lebanon. 

The voice of the Lord — his mighty thunder — rends the cedars, 
yea, the Lord shivers to atoms the cedars of Lebanon. " Break- 
eth " in the last clause translates an intensive form of the same 
verb which appears in the first clause — an advance in the thought 
which the English verb can not imitate. 1 have given the sense. 

The cedar represents the strongest kind of.trees then known ; 

ihose of Lebanon, the finest of their kind, yet none of these can 
withstand the might of J ehovah. 

6. He maketh them also to skip like a calf; Lebanon 
and Sirion like a young unicorn. 

"He maketh them," but who or what is meant by "them?" 
Either the cedars or the mountains on which they grow. The 
parallel clause gives us " Lebanon and Sirion [Hermon] and there- 
fore favors the sense — the thunder shakes the very mountains. 

The Hebrew word used here is not supposed to mean the "uni- 
corn" but the buffalo or wild ox, and here the young of this 
animal. The figure is bold and strong — the great mountains of 
Lebanon leaping and dancing like a calf. 

7. The voice of the Lord divideth the flames of fire. 

The verb ("divideth") means to cut or cleave asunder. As to 
the sense here, we must choose between the phenomena of forked 
lightning, and the cleaving force of the electric fluid in cutting its 
way through any obstacle whatever. In the latter case we might 
translate: "The Lord cutteth or heweth his way with flames of 
fire." Isaiah (51: 9) has the same verb in this sense: "Art not 



126 



PSALM XXIX. 



thou it that hath cut Kahab ?" (Egypt) ; also Hosea (6:5) : " I have 
hewed them by the prophets " ; i. e., have foretold that I would hew 
them. These cases of usage favor the latter construction. 

8. The voice of the Lord shaketh the wilderness ; the 
Lord shaketh the wilderness of Kadesh. 

Not upon the high mountains only, but equally upon the vast 
deserts do the lightnings exert their fearful power. 

9. The voice of the Lord maketh the hinds to calve, and 
discovereth the forests : and in his temple doth every one 
speak of his glory. 

Sudden terror brings on parturition. ^These startling displays 
of God's glorious majesty produce this effect upon wild animals. 

" Discovereth the forests" in the sense not of finding by search 

but of laying bare, stripping them of leaves, limbs, and even 

bark. In God's glorious temple, the universe, every thing cries 

aloud, Glory! what glory/ The original verb translated "speak 
of" means precisely to say — or proclaim aloud; not to speak of; 
and is followed by the words spoken, as here. All created things, 
animate and inanimate, intelligent or unintelligent, are thought of 
as crying aloud, Behold God's glory! 

10. The Lord sitteth upon the flood ; yea, the Lord 
sitteth King forever. 

In the phrase "upon the flood," we must choose between a his- 
toric allusion to the deluge of Noah, and a poetic reference to the 
same assumed superincumbent ocean above the firmament which 
appears in v. 3. The latter must be preferred both because of the* 
previous reference (v. 3) to this body of waters, and because the 
parallel clause bears us to the heavenly throne of the Almighty, 

thought of as only just above this celestial ocean. "Sitteth 

upon the flood" alludes to sitting as a king on his throne, i. e., the 
throne reposing above this supposed mass of waters. 

11. The Lord will give strength unto his people ; the 
Lord will bless his people with peace. 

This Great God whose majesty and glory stand forth revealed in 
such appalling forms throughout this Psalm is the Jehovah — the 
faithful God of his trustful people, in covenant relation with them 
as their God and Friend, Almighty to save and to bless them. 
What have they to fear with such a God their Friend and Savior? 
Jonathan Edwards gives us this experience : When my heart was 
far from God, every thunder storm was a terror; but when I came 
near to him in loving trust through Jesus Christ, I used to look 
out with inexpressible delight upon the black thunder clouds, say- 
ing to myself, That is my God! 



PSALM XXX. 



127 



PSALM XXX. 

Some critics hold that this Psalm was composed on the occasion 
of dedicating the royal palace of David, this being in their view 
affirmed in the caption which stands in the English version, "A 
Psalm or Song at the dedication of the house of David." Others 
suppose that the word "house" in the caption has in this case its 
very frequent sense, the temple; that David's name is here, not 
as the owner or occupant of the house, but the author of the 
Psalm, the sense being, not the house of David, but a Psalm of 
David, and further that the scope of the Psalm does not adapt 
itself to the dedication of David's own residence, but does admira- 
bly to his consecration of the ground for the temple built by Solo- 
mon and to his erection of an altar ^ there. See 2 Sam. 24, and 1 

Chron. 21, and 22 : 1. The only argument of any weight for 

the former view is the usage of the word "dedicate" which is ap- 
plied (Deut. 20: 5) to the consecration of a private residence. 
But this I think is far outweighed by the fact that David's name 
in the caption must, according to usage, indicate his authorship of 
the Psalm and not his ownership of the house ; and by the striking 
adaptation of the Psalm to the circumstances which led to the 
location of the temple. It will be remembered that David had 
sinned against God in his official order for the numbering of the 
people ; that in consequence a pestilence was sent upon the people 
and seventy thousand fell within three days ; that David gave him- 
self most solemnly to penitence and prayer ; that the Lord heard 
his cry and commanded the destroying angel to stay his hand. 
By his prophet he then directed David to build an altar on the 
very spot where the angel stood when the order came to stay his 
hand. That spot of hallowed associations David bought, and then 
built there an altar, offered sacrifices which the Lord signally 
answered by fire from heaven ; — whereupon David accepted these 
facts as God's own consecration of this spot to be the site of the 
future temple — in a sort, a dedication of its corner-stone — and forth- 
with proceeded to make preparation for the temple on this very 
ground. " Then David said, This is the house of the Lord God 
and this is the altar of the burnt-offering for Israel" (1 Chron. 
22 : 1). 

1. I will extol thee, O Lord ; for thou hast lifted me up, 
and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me. 

The slight play on the related ideas of the first two verbs is a 
beauty: " I will lift thee on high by my praises because thou hast 
lifted me up as out of a deep pit, from my perils." This second 
verb ["lifted me up"] suggests the drawing of water from a deep 
well. So God had lifted him out of the imminent perils of that 
fearful pestilence. David had such a sense of his own personal 
sin in the numbering* of the people that he almost protested 
against the visitation of the pestilence upon the people, demanding 



128 



PSALM XXX. 



that it should rather fall only upon himself and his family. But 
God wonderfully lifted him out of those perils. " Hast not suf- 
fered my foes to exult over me" — for throughout his whole reign, 
there remained some of the family or tribe of Saul who, through 
envy at his prosperity and sympathy with, the fortunes of Saul, 
were ready to exult over his destruction (See 2 Sam. 16 : 5-13). 

2. O Lord ray God, I cried unto thee, and thou hast 
healed me. 

3. O Lord, thou hast brought up my soul from the 
grave : thou hast kept me alive, that I should not go down 
to the pit. 

It is at least supposable that the pestilence before which seventy 
thousand fell touched David's, person, though not fatally. Upon 
his humtele cry to God, healing mercy came and brought him up 
from the jaws of death. His words mean precisely, Thou hast 
spared me alive from those [or out of those] who were going 
down by thousands to the grave. These words become specially 
pertinent under the supposition that he was attacked by the 
great plague, but restored in answer to his prayer. 

4. Sing unto the Lord, O ye saints of his, and give 
thanks at the remembrance of his holiness. 

Most truly an occasion for songs of praise from all the saints. 

''At the remembrance of his holiness," with special reference 

to the purity and justice which were manifested in disapproving 
the spirit and act of David in numbering the people and in pun- 
ishing him severely for that sin. David's motive in that official 
order was doubtless pride, national pride — a feeling which took 
credit to himself for the great prosperity of the nation, and with- 
held from God the honor due supremely to him. God in his holi- 
ness rebuked this pride, and David now calls for public thanks- 
giving at the remembrance of this holiness. True penitence had 
brought David's heart back once more into sympathy with God in 
his ways of holiness and justice. 

5. For his anger endureth but a moment; in his favor is 
life : weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the 
morning. 

More literally Ave might read: "For a moment" [passes] "in 
his anger; then life" [comes] "in his favor: at evening, weeping 
lasts through the night; in the morning, a shout of joy!" So 
brief and transient are the moments of God's displeasure; so soon 
his anger passes away and his favor brings life out of the jaws of 
death. One night of tears ; but with the morning, songs of joyful 
deliverance! Those three days of fearful pestilence once past 
seemed short compared with the long years.of God's mercy toward 
the nation and toward David's own house. Such for the most 
part is human life. Health the rule; sickness the exception: com- 



PSALM XXX. 



129 



fort fills out the years; pain and anguish are shut into the mo- 
ments: weeping sometimes all the night, and then relief and joy 

for the days and years that follow. As bearing upon God's 

dealings with his people we may compare Isa. 54: 7-8. 

6. And in my prosperity I said, I shall never be moved. 

7. Lord, by thy favor thou hast made my mountain to 
stand strong : thou didst hide thy face, and I was troubled. 

The original makes the pronoun "I " more prominent, thus : As 
to myself, i. e., to revert now to my own personal experience; under 
the influence of my extraordinary prosperity I was saying, I shall 
never be disturbed ; this prosperity will never be interrupted. 
These words reveal the approaches of that temptation before which 
David fell into the sin of numbering his people. It was the seduc- 
tive influence of great prosperity. The Lord through his favor 
had made his mountain, i. e., his throne on the hill of Zion, to 
stand strong. More literally, " thou hast given great stability to 

my mountain." This sin was the less excusable because God 

had carefully forewarned his people against it. (See Deut. 8: 
11-18.) "When thou hast eaten and art full, beware that thou 
forget not the Lord thy God, and then thy heart be lifted up," 

etc. But all suddenly the Lord hid his face in sore displeasure 

and I was confounded [more than merely "troubled"]; I was 
baffled every way, and knew not whither to turn for relief save to 
do as I ultimately did, look unto the same holy God whose scourg- 
ing hand was on me and my people. 

8. I cried to thee, O Lord ; and unto the Lord I made 
supplication. 

9. What profit is there in my blood, when I go down to 
the pit ? Shall the dust praise thee ? Shall it declare thy 
truth? 

The verbs in v. 8, "cry," "make supplication," are future, and 
manifestly give his feelings and purposes as to what he would do. 

He said within himself, 1 will cry to my God. His plea with 

God is to be specially noticed : What would my life-blood avail if 
thou shouldest send me to the grave? Does the decomposed dust 
of the dead in their graves render praise to God ? Does it bear 
witness before living men to thy truth ? i. e., If I may live I shall 
praise God and witness to his truth before the living, and this will 
avail to the glory and honor of God. But, cut down in death, my 
lips are dumb thenceforth as to any testimony for God in the land 
of the living. Essentially the same reasoning appears in Ps. 6 : 
5, and 88: 10-12, and Isa. 38: 18-19. See also Ps. 115: 17, etc. 
-This need not be pressed to imply that the dead are uncon- 
scious or have ceased to be. It simply implies that they are re- 
moved from the scenes of earth and can send back no voice, no 
sign, no testimony, to the living on this earth. 



130 



PSALM XXXI. 



10. Hear, O Lord, and have mercy upon me : Lord, 
be thou my helper. 

11. Thou hast turned for me my mourning into dancing: 
thou hast put off my sackcloth, and girded me with glad- 
ness ; 

12. To the end that my glory may sing praise to thee, 
and not be silent. O Lord my God, -I will give thanks 
unto thee forever. 

V. 10 gives his prayer in that day of his calamity; and v. 11 
his testimony that God heard propitiously. " Put off my sack- 
cloth" — more precisely, loosed the girdle -which bound it upon 

me, and girded me with joy instead. To the end that my glory, 

my noblest powers; or since the word "my" is not expressed, it 
may be taken in a broader sense — all that is noble and glorious — 
glory universally ; all the glory of created beings — may sing praise 
to thee and never be dumb. My heart goes out in this service of 
praise. For my part, I will give thanks to my glorious God, my 
Redeemer and Savior, forever and ever ! 

PSALM XXXI. 

Expressions common in David's Psalms, not to say peculiar 
to them, occur in this Psalm, indorsing the testimony of the 
caption to his authorship. We may suppose that he consigned 
it to the choir-leader ["chief musician"] for use in the songs 
of the Sanctuary, deeming it adapted for that worship. Per- 
haps his revising hand gave it this general adaptation by modi- 
fying its personal allusions to his own experience so that 
every pious Israelite might sing the whole Psalm as his own 
experience. If so, we have accounted for the absence of those 
very special historic marks which would enable us to locate the 
Psalm with certainty at some definite point in his recorded his- 
tory. Most of the commentators find the historic point for this 

Psalm in 1 Sam. 23, when David lay at Keilah or in the wilder- 
ness of Ziph, and escaped Saul's vengeance in the first instance 
by divine forewarning ; in the second, by means of an irruption 
of the Philistines demanding Saul's presence elsewhere. Of this 
theory we can only say there is nothing in the Psalm to forbid it, 
nor is there any thing which altogether forbids its application to 
other cases of deliverance. For the sake of a more definite and life- 
like illustration, we may wisely assume that the Psalm describes 
his experience during those eventful scenes. 

1. In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust ; let me never be 
ashamed : deliver me in thy righteousness. 

No expressions are more frequent in the recorded experience of 



rSALM XXXI. 131 

David than these: "In thee do I put my trust; let me never be 
put to shame." The first describes one of the most permanent 
attitudes of his mind, one which appears from time to time in the 
narrative of his life, and nowhere in a more touching manner 
than after the burning of Ziklag and the abduction of the wives 
and children, both his own and those of his party (1 Sam. 30 : 1-6). 
The shock was terrible. David was greatly distressed, not alone 
by the loss of his own wives and children and by sympathy with 
others in the same affliction, nor merely with the oppressive sense 
of personal responsibility in this emergency, but because the 
people in their agony of grief most unreasonably spake of stoning 
him. Yet here, without one strong human heart to lean upon, 
David, the record says, " encouraged himself in the Lord his 
God." "The Lord his God" gives us the key-note of his life. It 
was forever settled in his soul that Jehovah was his own God. 
He held this conviction in the spirit of a consciously full conse- 
cration to his honor and service, and of a strong, unshaken trust 
in his care and protection. With such a mutual understanding 
between God and himself, he might fitly say : " Let me never be 
put to shame." Never let it appear to my enemies that thou hast 
forsaken me and left me to perish. Would not they in such a case 
not only exult over me but reproach thee as a God not worthy to 

be trusted? "Deliver me in thy righteousness", rests its plea 

not on the ground of David's absolute sinlessness (see v. 10), but 
of God's fidelity to his promise and to his covenant obligations. 

2. Bow down thine ear to me ; deliver me speedily : be 
thou my strong rock, for a house of defense to save me. 

3. For thou art my rock and my fortress ; therefore for 
thy name's sake lead me, and guide me. 

4. Pull me out of the net that they have laid privily for 
me : for thou art my strength. 

"For thy name's sake" rests on the same basis. God's name 
was committed to his protection by the fact that David had accepted 
his promises, had given himself to his service on the guaranty of 
the requisite protection, and therefore was entitled to feel that 
Jehovah's name was pledged for his deliverance. It was God 
who had called David to the throne of Israel — a call which indi- 
rectly involved David in these years of peril from the hand of 
Saul. When David accepted this call he put himself under God's 
special protection, and therefore in the midst of these perils he 
continually urges this plea: "Be thou my refuge; hear me speed- 
ily;" pull me out of the net which they are already coiling around 
my very feet; "for thy name's sake lead me and guide me." 
These words are pregnant with the precious associations of 
shepherd-life. Be thou my shepherd ; let me be as thy weak and 
lost lamb ; lead me safely out from all these dangers. 



132 



PSALM XXXI. 



5. Iiito thine band I commit my spirit: thou hast re- 
deemed me, O Lord God of truth. 

These words are appropriate to any dying saint, and were used 
by Jesus dying (Luke 23 : 46), and by the martyred Stephen 
(Acts 7: 59); yet we need not assume that in using them David 
thought of himself as dying, but rather as fully committing the 
whole question of life and death into the hands of his God, in the 
assurance that God both had redeemed him from death in other 
perils and would again. — ; — In offering his prayer thus, " Lord 
God of truth" he indicated the hold he consciously had upon God's 
promise and veracity for his deliverance. I know thou wilt not 
fail mc, for thou art a true and faithful God. 

6. I have hated them that regard lying vanities : but I 
trust in the Lord. 

The Hebrew words for " lying vanities " are among the strongest 
in the language to express the ideas of emptiness, falsehood, certain 
failure, absolute nothingness; and are frequently applied to idol 
gods as objects of trust and worship. They admit, however, of 
being applied to every other object of trust (save God alone) 
chosen and relied on by wicked men. It was strong language in 
David's lips to say : I hate those who thus give their heart and 
trust to any thing else whatever than God ; I hate their spirit; I 
have not the least sympathy with their heart or life, for I trust 
[only and wholly] in the Lord. 

7. I will be glad and rejoice in thy mercy : for thou hast 
considered my trouble; thou hast known my soul in ad- 
versities ; 

8. And hast not shut me up into the hand of the enemy: 
thou hast set my feet in a large room. 

Characteristically David passes frequently in this class of Psalms 
from the dark shades of his experience to the bright; from the 
agony of solicitude and prayer, to the joy and triumph of praise 
for deliverance. Of the latter we have an instance here : " I will 
be glad and rejoice in thy mercy (favor far beyond my desert); 
thou hast looked upon mine affliction ; thou hast known the 
troubles of my soul" — known in the sense of a tender and ap- 
preciative regard. "Set my foot in a large room" is a figure 

very common with David, and we may add, very appropriate, for 
his chief danger lay in being cornered and shut in by Saul's pur- 
suing hosts. A large place and ample field for flight was his 
safety. 

9. Have mercy upon me, O Lord, for I am in trouble : 
mine eye is consumed with grief, yea, my soul and my 
belly. 

10. For my life is spent with grief, and my years with 



PSALM XXXI. 



133 



sighing : my strength faileth because of mine iniquity, and 
my bones are consumed. 

Recuring again to his bitter trials, he represents them as a long 
and terrible affliction — as wasting his life-power, impairing his 
health, poisoning the fountains of ' his peace and comfort, and all 
the more so because blended with a sense of sin ["my strength 
faileth because of mine iniquity"] — of which, what can we say 
less, than that this is but too often one of the most bitter ingredi- 
ents in our cup of trial on earth — the conviction that we are far 
from sinless ; that some things in our spirit, perhaps in our perma- 
nent character, are not pleasing to God and call for his manifested 
displeasure. The consciousness of God's personal favor shaded 
with doubt and fear, with sore burdens of trial also from other 
sources, press continually upon us: alas, whither shall we look 
for help ! 

11. I was a reproach among all mine enemies, but es- 
pecially among my neighbors, and a fear to mine acquain- 
tance : they that did see me without fled from me. 

12. I am forgotten as a dead man out of mind : I am 
like a broken vessel. 

13. For I have heard the slander of many : fear ivas on 
every side : while they took counsel together against me, 
they devised to take away my life. 

Saul, the arch enemy of David during these perilous years, was 
in power, and moreover was intensely jealous of any and every 
man who manifested friendship for David. Consequently, not for 
any fault of his own, David became an outcast and exile from many 
of his former friends and neighbors. Few had the courage or the 
sympathy with him to be willing to appear as his friend. Hence 
his circumstances made him, in these respects, a sort of type of his 
greater Son, who, not at all for his own fault, was " despised and 

rejected of men." David seemed to himself to be dropped like 

a dead man from the thought of the living; or, under another 

figure, to be like a potsherd— a broken or worthless vessel. The 

phrases in v. 13 are used by Jeremiah also (20: 10, and 6: 25) — 
a fact easily accounted for without assuming that Jeremiah wrote 
this Psalm. This remarkable assumption (made by some German 
critics) seems utterly destitute of plausibility, and much more, of 
proof. 

14. But I trusted in thee, O Lord : I said, Thou art 
my God. 

But, despite of this almost universal reproach, I [for my part] 
put my trust in thee, O Lord : I said, Thou art still my God though 
every other friend forsake me ! How fitting that his heart should 
cleave the more closely to his God because his other friends proved 
so unreliable ! 



134 PSALM XXXI. 

15. My times are in thy hand : deliver me from the hand 
of mine enemies, and from them that persecute me. 

"My times, " not my life only, but all the events that make up 
its surroundings and determine its future. Perhaps his thought 
was somewhat on the time when he should reach the throne of 
Israel, which God had virtually pledged to him. It was his joy 

that his divine Lord would fix that time in his own wisdom. 

With, perhaps, a slight play on the word " hand," he prays that 
God's hand may be against the hand of his enemies, counter work- 
ing their efforts. 

16. Make thy face to shine upon thy servant: save me 
for thy mercies' sake. 

17. Let me not be ashamed, O Lord ; for I have called 
upon thee : let the wicked be ashamed, and let them be si- 
lent in the grave. 

18. Let the lying lips be put to silence; which speak 
grievous things proudly and contemptuously against the 
righteous. 

Beautifully expressive are these words : " Make thy face to shine 
upon thy servant." When every face of human friend is turned 
away and never a kind look of light and joy comes from my fellow- 
men, then let thy face shine into this dense darkness and make my 

path-way bright and radiant with thy love! Let the shame 

[confusion] of frustrated hopes not fall to my lot, but rather to 
the lot of my wicked enemies, who are thy enemies as really as 
mine, and mine because they are thine. Let their lying, slander- 
ous lips be silenced ! 

19. Oh how great is thy goodness, which thou hast laid 
up for them that fear thee; which thou hast wrought for 
them that trust in thee before the sons of men! 

His prayer is heard and his soul is thereby deeply affected with 
a sense of the great goodness which God has ever in reserve, se- 
cretly stored away but ever in readiness for its fit occasion. God 
has often made it manifest before the world in his ways of provi- 
dence toward his trustful people. In this verse the working 
["wrought"], and not the trusting, are thought of as done before 
the sons of men: the sense being "wrought before the sons of 
men for them that trust in thee." 

20. Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence 
from the pride of man : thou shalt keep them secretly in a 
pavilion from the strife of tongues. 

The Hebrew plays upon its words: "Thou shalt hide them in 
the hiding-place of thy presence; or secrete them in the secrecy of 
thy presence. The word translated " pride " [" pride of man"l 



PSALM XXXIL 



135 



occurs only here, and probably in the sense of plots, conspiracies, 
corresponding to " strife of tongues " in the parallel clause ; which, 
however, is not the jargon of conflicting tongues, but the struggle 
of his combined enemies to destroy him with their slanderous ac- 
cusations. 

21. Blessed be the Lord: for he hath showed me his 
marvelous kindness in a strong city. 

It is possible that this " strong city " may be Keilah itself, where 
God remarkably heard his prayer and gave him forewarning of 
his danger, (1 Sam. 23 : 1-13); but more probably David meant 
that God had given him protection and safety analogous to that 
of a strong city. 

22. For I said in my haste, I am cut off from before 
thine eyes : nevertheless thou heardest the voice of my 
supplications when I cried unto thee. 

The word "haste" [trepidation] has been thought to identify 
this passage with 1 Sam. 23 : 26, where the corresponding verb is 
used — "David made haste to get away for fear of Saul" — the haste 
of trepidation and great fear. This was at the point of his escape 
from the wilderness of Ziph, where a sudden irruption of the 
Philistines was God's appointed agency for the relief of David — 
his way of hearing David's prayer* 

23. O love the Lord, all ye his saints : for the Lord 
preserveth the faithful, and plentifully rewardeth the 
proud doer. 

24. Be of good courage, and he shall strengthen your 
heart, all ye that hope in the Lord. 

Verily the Lord who thus hears the cry of his needy, trustful 
children, is most worthy of their love. Let their hearts be drawn 
to him in grateful affection, and let all those be of good courage 
and strong heart who hope in the Lord, for David's rich experi- 
ence ought to assure every saint, that his God, faithfully served, 
and earnestly sought unto, will never forsake him. 

PSALM XXXII. 

The caption ascribes this Psalm to David with only the ad- 
ditional " Masch.il," i. e.,for instruction — as said also in the body 

of the Psalm (v. 8) ; "I will instruct thee." Both the use of 

the first person in this Psalm and the things said combine to show 
that David is giving his own experience. There is no reasonable 
doubt that the Psalm was occasioned by his great sin in the mat- 
ter of Bathsheba and Uriah which even the history recognizes as 
the one great sin of his life. [" David did that which was right 



136 



PSALM XXXII. 



in the eyes of the Lord, and turned not aside from any thing that 
he commanded him all the days of his life, save only in the mat- 
ter of Uriah the Hittite" (1 Kings 15: 5)]. In addition to the 

light thrown upon this experience of his in the history (2 Sam. 
11 and 12) and in Ps. 51, we have here the bitter agony, the chaf- 
ing of his conscience and the dreadful unrest which filled those 
fearful days that lay between the sin and the confession thereof. 
Very appropriately these revelations are made here for our in- 
struction. 

1. Blessed is he whose transgression is forgiven, whose sin 
is covered. 

2. Blessed is the man unto whom the Lord imputeth not 
iniquity, and in whose spirit there is no guile. 

The first word here (as in Ps. 1: 1), translated in its full 
strength, would read, "O the blessedness of those who are for- 
given of sin, covered as to their iniquity ! How blessed is the 
man to whom the Lord does not impute sin," i. e., account it as 
standing against him in law, unforgiven. But this man must be 
profoundly sincere in his penitence, one in whose spirit there is 
no deceit, no insincerity; who makes no hypocritical pretensions, 
but whose confessions mean all they say.' David had felt the 
sweet relief which comes of such confession and of the resulting 
sense of pardon from God. "Well might he exclaim, 0 the blessed- 
ness of this sense of pardon ! 

3. When I kept silence, my bones waxed old through my 
roaring all the day long. 

4. For day and night thy hand was heavy upon me : my 
moisture is turned into the drought of summer. Selah. 

So long as he kept silence, laboring to smother his convictions 
and conceal his great sin, the dreadful agony was in his soul ; his 
very bones — the firmest and least impressible part of his bodily 
frame — waxed old under the wasting torture, and he could only 
groan and sigh or moan all the day. Yes, all the day and all the 
night as well, the hand of God, impressing a sense of guilt, was 
heavy upon him. "My moisture," the juice of my life — the figure 
being taken from vegetable life and meaning the fresh and joyous 
life-power — turned to the drought of summer. From being a 
green, living, lovely tree, I became a dry stick. These figures 
from the vegetable world, applied to his body to set forth the 
agony of his soul, are intensely expressive. "What a life was 
this ! Who can measure the woes of a guilty conscience, height- 
ened by a sense of that awful eye of God, impressing his purity 

and justice, and making the soul afraid of his wrath! "Selah " 

calls for a thoughtful pause over these startling but most in- 
structive facts of his heart-history. 

5. I acknowledged my sin unto thee, and mine iniquity 



PSALM XXXII. 



137 



have I not hid. I said, I will confess my transgressions 
unto the Lord ; and thou forgavest the iniquity of my sin. 
Selah. 

The first verb [" acknowledge "] is future in tense, the best ex- 
planation of which is that it indicates how he felt and what he 
said within himself — thus : I said to myself, "my sin I will make 
known to thee; and [consequently] I no longer covered my sin. 
I said, I will make confession to Jehovah concerning my sin, and 
then thou didst forgive, etc. And thus his dreadful agony found 
relief. "He that confesseth and forsaketh his sins shall have 
mercy (Prov. 28 : 13). Nor David alone. Myriads of burdened, 
agonized souls have found the same relief in the same way. It is 
the great law of salvation for sinners before a righteous and holy 
God. He has written his name, " The Lord God, merciful and 
gracious, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity " 
(Ex, 34: 6, 7). But penitent confession comes before forgiveness. 

" Selah " suggests that here is another truth over which it were 

well to pause for deep reflection and practical self-application. 

6. For this shall every one that is godly pray unto thee 
in a time when thou mayest be found : surely in the floods 
of great waters they shall not come nigh unto him. 

The limitation to "every one that is godly" seems to say that 
David was thinking specially of sins committed by the true child- 
ren of God. This would naturally result from the fact that the 

Psalm is based on his own experience. For such precious 

pardon may every godly man well pray. Let him never fail of 

it! "In a time when thou mayest be found" suggests that this 

is limited and will not continue long. Let every convicted soul 
hasten to seize the moment of possible pardon — the precious time 
within which God may be found a hearer of such prayer and a 

graciously forgiving God. In the last clause the word rendered 

"surely" admits of two constructions, viz.: this of our English 
version, and another which gives it the more usual sense of only 
and makes it qualify him who offers such acceptable prayer, thus : 
In the floods of great waters, unto him only shall they not come 
nigh. He alone will be accepted and spared. The location of the 
word at the head of the sentence favors the former; the more 

common usage of the word the latter. Under either construction 

the figure is strong and fine. In the floods of great waters they shall 
not reach him. Like Noah, riding in his ark above the floods, or 
like one on the hill-tops whom the floods can not reach, he is safe. 
Those floods engulf the prayerless, but not him. 

7. Thou art my hiding-place ; thou shalt preserve me from 
trouble ; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliver- 
ance. Selah. 

The remarkable thing here is that a sinner so lately tortured 



138 



PSALM XXXII. 



with a sense of guilt and shrinking before the awful eye of God 
should now speak so sweetly of finding in this same God a hiding- 
place for his soul, a preserving hand against all danger and trouble, 
a God of ready and warm heart to gird him all about with joyous 
songs of deliverance ! Is not this for a wonder and joy forever, 
that God can so freely and so fully forgive, and make the feast 
over the prodigal's return so luscious, the welcome so warm, the 

love so rich, so re-assuring, so Godlike ? " Compass me about 

with songs of deliverance " is singularly strong and expressive. 
It is not merely that his heart is full of them, but they invest him 
on every side; they enrobe him, they overspread him from head 

to foot — his glory and his covering ! Here is a fit place for one 

more pause to think of these wonders of God's love. Hence, 
" Selah." 

8. I will instruct thee and teach thee in the way which 
thou shalt go : I will guide thee with mine eye. 

David longs to make his own experience useful to others. He 

had promised this on condition of being himself forgiven. 

"Eestore unto me the joy of thy salvation, then will I teach 
transgressors thy ways " (Ps. 51 : 12, 13). Therefore he says here, 
"I will instruct" — will make this song a "Maschil" — i. e., for in- 
struction. Bringing before his mind some fallen one like himself, 
he gives him this counsel : " I will teach thee as to the way thou 
shalt go" — the way of frank, sincere confession, and of humble 

prayer for mercy. The last clause better thus: "I will guide; 

mine eye shall be upon thee." The preposition before "thee" 
[having the sense u upon"~\ strongly favors this construction. 

9. Be ye not as the horse, or as the mule, which have no 
understanding: whose mouth must be held in with bit and 
bridle, lest they come near unto thee. 

A more precise translation will make the true sense plain. " Be 
ye not as the horse, as the mule, to understand nothing; to be 
subdued with bit and curb — their ornament — for not coming 
near to thee," i. e., because they will not come near; or, else 
they will not come near to thee. The coming contemplated is not 
the rush of high-spirited, unbroken animals to tread you down, but 
coming near in gentleness and submission as the well tamed do 
for our service. The idea is that the fractious horse and the stub- 
burn mule are offish, mulish, timid, and must be treated with 
powerful curb and bit, or you can not bring them near you. So 
guilty sinners are wont to be offish, fearful, distant; they can not 
or will not bring their souls to come near to the Great God against 
whom they are conscious of having grievously sinned. Therefore 
he is compelled to treat them to bit and curb, to chastisement and 
pain ; else he could not bring them near him. Nothing is moro 
common than such ways of God's discipline to bring sinners 
near. It was a great misapprehension in our English transla- 



PSALM XXXIII. 



139 



tors to suppose that the bit and bridle were used to keep horse 
and mule from coming too near, instead of being used to break in 
those timid or wayward creatures and tame them to come to you, 
fearless and kind. The true version gives one of the finest illus- 
trations of God's ways in discipline, and suggests that we use the 
understanding God has given us to see and appreciate his love and 
to let it have its subduing and winning power on our otherwise 
stubborn and reluctant hearts. Such is the spirit of this exhorta- 
tion. It is but too often needed. Conscious guilt is shrinking and 
does not love to face the purity against which it has sinned. 
Naturally sin is maddening and often seems to rob men of their 
understanding, so that they need to be exhorted not to imi- 
tate the wild horse and mule in their reckless folly. The English 
version misses also the true sense of the Hebrew words which fol- 
low "bit and bridle," viz.: "his ornament."* This seems to sug- 
gest that the horse-tamer, while recognizing the necessity of some 
curbing power, contrives to make it not merely useful but ornamen- 
tal, hiding whatever might be repulsive in its power under forms 
of beauty. So God has many ways of sweetening the bitter medi- 
cine which he finds indispensable for the moral healing of men. 

10. Many sorrows shall be to the wicked : but he that 
trusteth in the Lord, mercy shall compass him about. 

11. Be glad in the Lord, and rejoice, ye righteous : and 
shout for joy, all ye that are upright in heart. 

The persistently wicked have many — ah, how many sorrows; 
sorrows in their sinning — after their sinning ; all through this 
life — all through the life to come; but he who trusts in the Lord, 
first penitently confessing and forsaking his sin, shall have mercy 
clothing, investing, adorning him all round about. This " compass- 
ing about" is the same word as in v. 7. To call upon the 

righteous for joyful thanksgiving fitly closes this instructive Psalm. 
Why not rejoice when their cup of joy so overflows and when 
they have such testimony to the deep, eternal, loving-kindness of 
the Lord their Kedeemer ? 

PSALM XXXIII. 

This Psalm appears with no caption — no hint from the compilers 
or the author to indicate who the author was or what was its oc- 
casion or special design. This fact of itself suggests strongly that 
this Psalm was regarded by the compilers as a continuation of the 
one preceding, or at least as standing in very close connection 
with it and written by the same author. This seems to have been 
the method adopted by the compilers of the Psalms (obtaining in 



140 



PSALM XXXIII. 



general in Psalms 1-72) — that whenever a following Psalm con- 
tinued the same general subject as the next preceding, or sus- 
tained specially close relations to it, having apparently the same 
author and occasion, then it opened at once with no name of 
author and none of the points common to the captions of the 
Psalms. The cases are Ps. 1 and 2; 9 and 10; 32 and 33; 42 

and 43 ; 70 and 71 ; 90 and 91. In the case now before us the 

reader will readily compare 32: 11, "Rejoice, ye righteous," with 
33: 1, "Rejoice in the Lord, 0 ye righteous." The Hebrew 
reader would notice that the verb "shout for joy" (32: 11) is the 
same with the first word of this Psalm, translated "rejoice" — a 
word of strong significance and of rather rare occurrence, mean- 
ing shout aloud, exult with strong demonstrations — outcries of joy- 
ous acclaim. A closer study of the scope of this Psalm in its re- 
lation to the one preceding will suggest that it is essentially an 
expansion of the sentiment of joyous thanksgiving and of grateful 
adoration with which Ps. 32 closes. In other words, it gives us 
David's heart-experiences after the agonies of unrepentant convic- 
tion had passed away with the free and full confession of his sin 
and had given place to the deeply affecting sense of personal for- 
giveness. Then David rejoiced in God as never before. It was 
like the joy of the new-born soul in the outgushings of its first 
love, under its yet fresh sense of the greatness of that mercy 
which can so wonderfully forgive. Noticeably we have the same 
connection between the fact and the sense of pardon on the one 
hand, and joy in God on the other, in Ps. 51: 14, 15: "Deliver 
me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God of my salvation, and 
my tongue shall sing aloud of thy righteousness. O Lord, open 
thou my lips, and my mouth shall show forth thy praise." The 
promise made in these words, this Ps. 33 fulfills. Hence there 
seems to be no reasonable doubt that this Psalm is by David, 
written in connection with Ps. 32, virtually a continuation of it, 
and giving the thoughts and feelings of his heart after his repent- 
ance and the consequent restoration to him of the joys of God's 
salvation. 

1 . Rejoice in the Lord, O ye righteous : for praise is 
comely for the upright. 

2. Praise the Lord with harp : sing unto him with the 
psaltery and an instrument of ten strings. 

3. Siug unto him a new song ; play skillfully with a loud 
noise. 

The distinctive feature in the righteous as here thought of is not 
that they have never sinned, but that they are thoroughly peni- 
tent and graciously forgiven — enjoying therefore the blessedness 
of him whose transgressions are forgiven and whose iniquity is 
covered, and in whose spirit is no deceit (32 : 1, 2). For all such, 
praise is indeed comely, most appropriate ; and every truly peni- 
tent, forgiven soul must feel it to be so. Does it not call for "a 



PSALM XXXIII. 



141 



new song," celebrating new mercies?— — Here musical instru- 
ments are first introduced in the Psalms. In the use of these, 
David had extraordinary skill (1 Sam. 16: 16-18); some of these 
were his own invention (Amos 6 : 5, and 1 Chron. 23 : 5). The 
precise construction of these various instruments is lost irrecover- 
ably. We know that they were used as an accompaniment to the 
voice, and may safely presume that they were adapted for sacred 
music — well adapted, considering the genius and culture of the 
age. 

4. For the word of the Lord is right ; and all his 
works are done in truth. 

5. He loveth righteousness and judgment : the earth is 
full of the goodness of the Lord. 

These are adequate reasons why God should be praised. 
His revealed word is in every respect right, pure, and perfect; and 
all his works are wrought with fidelity, faithfulness, truth. "He 
loveth righteousness and judgment " — a statement which might 
apply to his own approbation of his own infinitely perfect charac- 
ter, or to his estimate of the character of creatures, especially of 

man. The connection of thought favors the latter. The earth 

is full of manifestations of his goodness. Every thing even in * 
this world of rebellion testifies that God is good. Especially was 
the earth as God first made it full of the goodness of the Lord. 
He looked forth then upon the work of his hands and pronounced 
all " very good " (Gen. 1 : 31). For all this let his name be praised. 

6. By the word of the Lord were the heavens made; 
and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth. 

7. He gathereth the waters of the sea together as a heap : 
he layeth up the depth in storehouses. 

All these manifest and wonderful proofs of goodness in the 
heavens above and in the earth beneath are to be ascribed to God, 
for he is their Supreme Creator. This is the logical connection be- 
tween these verses and the preceding. All you see of goodness in 
earth or sky; all these marvelous revealings of wisdom and 
beauty, of adaptation to the happiness of man and of myriads of 
other sentient beings, are to be ascribed directly and wholly to 
God their Creator; "for by the word of the Lord were the heavens 

made." The word for "breath" is in Hebrew, Spirit, with 

manifest reference to Gen. 1 : 2 — " The spirit of God brooded 
upon the face of the deep" — said of the creative energy. Beyond 
question David had his eye on Gen. 1, and took his leading words 
and ideas from that original account of the creation. He writes : 
"The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord," while Moses 
wrote, "God saw every thing he had made, and behold it was 
very good" (Gen. 1 : 31). David cla ssjjje_s^Iie_^eate(L-worl(is into 
the earth, the^h£avens, and all t he\T_Jwst ; and so does Moses. 



142 



PSALM XXXIII. 



David locates the creative energy in the word of the Lord and in 
the spirit of his mouth, while Moses has it, "God said, let light be; 
and light was ; and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the 
waters." David specifies the gathering together of the waters of 
the sea into an heap, into storehouses, and Moses expands more 
fully the same fact. David seizes upon the main points and omits 
many of the details of the six days' work simply because his ref- 
erence to the creation has a moral and not an historical purpose. 

8. Let all the earth fear the Lord ; let all the inhab- 
itants of the world stand in awe of him. 

9. For he spake, and it was done; he commanded, and 
it stood fast. 

Therefore let all the earth revere Jehovah. The fear expressed 
by the word reverence, the spirit of the loving child, such fear as 
begets obedience, homage, worship ; and not the dread of penal 
inflictions — not the fear of the crushed slave — is the precise idea. 

Why should we cherish such fear ? The reason given is — 

"for he said and it was; he commanded, and it stood." His in- 
finite energy went forth with only a word from his mouth ; it was 

but for him to say, " Let it be," and it luas. As written by 

David the word "he" is made specially emphatic; It was he who 
said those sublime words given by Moses; it was he who com- 
manded and the earth stood — took its place in the vast family of 
God's worlds. " Said," * is the word used by Moses, and well 
chosen, for it is followed by the very words uttered : God said, 
"Let light be," etc. 

10. The Lord bringeth the counsel of the heathen to 
nought : he maketh the devices of the people of none effect. 

11. The counsel of the Lord standeth forever, the 
thoughts of his heart to all generations. 

A God of sufficient power to create can surely rule the worlds 
he has made and the creatures he has formed to dwell therein. 
Why then should the nations [heathen] combine against him and 
rage in their mad infatuation (Ps. 2:1)? The Lord can frustrate 
their wisest schemes. Their counsel shall not stand ; God's coun- 
sel shall. Our translators, bringing in the new word " devices," 
failed to do justice to David in the strength of his antithesis; for 
David puts the "counsel" and the "thoughts" of the people over 
against the "counsel" and the "thoughts" of God. The former 
God will bring to nought ; the latter shall stand forever. 

12. Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord ; and 
the people whom he hath chosen for his own inheritance. 

O how blessed the nation whose God is not made of wood or 
stone, gold or silver; but is the faithful Jehovah — at once the God 



PSALM XXXIII. 



143 



who built the heavens and the earth, and who is also in covenant 
relation with men, adopting them as his chosen people, his special 
inheritance. Plainly David brings together here those two grand 
ideas— that the God of Israel was at once fehe Creator of all 
worlds, and their own accepted Lord and King by special cove- 
nant. 

13. The Lord looketh from heaven ; he beholdeth all the 
sons of men. 

14. From the place of his habitation he looketh upon all 
the inhabitants of the earth. 

15. He fashioneth their hearts alike; he cousidereth all 
their works. 

God's omniscience is no less perfect than his omnipotence. To 
this the Psalmist now specially turns. "Down from heaven the 
Lord has looked" — always has, always will; "he beholdeth all the 
sons of men" — the same word which Moses continually uses to 
say that God saw his successive works of creation, all "very good." 
David would suggest that God sees the hearts of men even as he 

saw all the material works of his hands. " He looketh upon all 

the inhabitants of the earth " in the sense of attentively consider- 
ing, carefully studying their hearts and thoughts. This is the 

sense of the Hebrew word. * He is equally the Maker of all 

hearts — the sense being that he made them all by one creative 

act, rather than after the same fashion. " He understandeth " 

(much stronger than merely " considereth") "all their works." 

16. There is no king saved by the multitude of a host ; 
a mighty man is not delivered by much strength. 

17. A horse is a vain thing for safety : neither shall he 
deliver any by his great strength. 

The great number of the army ; the great might of the war- 
riors ; the great strength or fleetness of the war-horse — are of no 
account as compared with God, much less as matched against him. 
These ideas were exceedingly practical to David and his people 
in that militant age. They have a place therefore in such a relig- 
ious song as this which we can but feebly appreciate. 

18. Behold, the eye of the Lord is upon them that fear 
him, upon them that hope in his mercy ; 

19. To deliver their soul from death, and to keep them 
alive in famine. 

" Behold ; " look at this. The eye of the Lord is never turned 
away from his people who fear him and trust his mercy, that he 
should fail to see their need and give them his timely aid. The 



144 



PSALM XXXIY. 



specification of deliverance from death and famine covers in spirit 
all possible need. 

20. Our soul waiteth for the Lord : he is our help and 
our shield. 

21. For our heart shall rejoice in him, because we have 
trusted in his holy name. 

22. Let thy mercy j O Lord, be upon us, according as 
we hope in thee. 

The tone of these verses is that of exhortation to his people and 
of prayer to God. Let us trustfully wait on the Lord, so mighty 
to save and so faithful to all who trust him. We will rejoice in 
him, for our obedient and grateful trust assures his blessing ; yet 
let our last word be a prayer that God would still manifest his 
mercy according to the measure of our believing trust. 

PSALM XXXIV. 

At the head of this Psalm we read, "A Psalm of David, when 
he changed his behavior before Abimelech; who drove him 
away, and he departed." This refers to the circumstances narrated 
(1 Sam. 21 : 10-15) — David feigning insanity before Achish, King 
of Gath. He is here called "Abimelech," a name common to his 
dynasty, as the kings of certain Egyptian dynasties were all Pha- 
raohs, and of one Roman, all were Caesars. I see no good 
reason to question the correctness of this statement. Accepted, 
it need not be taken as fixing the time of writing the Psalm 
but only the occasion, the circumstances in view of which he 

subsequently wrote it. The tone of the Psalm is remarkably 

simple and beautiful, rich in the spirit of thanksgiving for his 

deliverance and of trust in God for all future need. No 

thoughtful mind can read it in the light of the circumstances 
which occasioned it, without raising the questions: What did 
David think at this time of his deception before Achish ? Did he 
justify it and regard it as the Lord's way (in such an emer- 
gency) of hearing his prayer for deliverance and of sending an 
angel for his rescue (vs. 4, 6, 7) ? Did he apparently think it con- 
sistent with the advice here given (vs. 13, 14) : " Keep thy tongue 
from evil and thy lips from speaking guile?" Or was this his 
view of it — that his course, though barely admissible, and suffered 
through the Lord's forbearance to pass unrebuked and even to 
prosper to the extent of his escape, was yet so near the bounding 
line between right and wrong that he felt it incumbent to warn his 

readers against "deceit and guile?" It is perhaps impossible 

to answer all these questions with certainty. It seems clear how- 
ever that David was deeply grateful for the mercy that bore him 
through this emergency with life, and forbore to rebuke his course 



PSALM XXXIV. 



145 



by frustrating its design ; also that the fullness and strength with 
which he speaks of God's perfect care of those who trust him shows 
that those scenes suggested to him God's wealth of resources for 
such protection, probably without the use of such doubtful expedients ; 
and finally that David did by no means aim to recommend his own 
course to others or the principle on which it rested. His cau- 
tion (vs. 13, 14) seems to settle this point. In the caption "his 

behavior" is literally his understanding. He acted as "one who 
had lost his reason — was insane. 

1. I will bless the Lord' at all times: his praise shall 
continually be in my mouth. 

2. My soul shall make her boast in the Lord : the 
humble shall hear thereof, and be glad. 

3. O magnify the Lord with me, and let us exalt his 
name together. 

A deep sense of great mercy impresses the duty of perpetual 
praise. My soul exults in the Lord. I deem his protection and 
love my highest glory. The humble (a general description of 
God's children) will be deeply interested in the saving mercy 

shown me, and will rejoice with me. This Psalm, like Ps. 25, 

is an acrostic on the Hebrew alphabet, the successive verses be- 
ginning with its successive letters — an expedient to aid the 
memory. 

4. I sought the Lord, and he heard me, and delivered 
me from all my fears. 

5. They looked unto him and were lightened : and their 
faces were not ashamed. 

6. This poor man cried and the Lord heard him, and 
saved him out of all his troubles. 

Obviously David regarded his escape from Achish as an 
answer to his prayer. " This poor man " is no other than 
himself in his straits and helplessness. In v. 5 the plural " they 
looked" etc., is peculiar but must be understood as said of the 
whole class represented by the Psalmist. All who truly fear God 
are accustomed to look up to him for help in trouble, and then 
their faces brighten up with the hope and ultimately the realization 
of deliverance. 

7. The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them 
that fear him, and delivereth them. 

The Lord's angel encampeth like a protecting army pitching 
their camp around to protect their dear ones. Probably David's 
thought is on the case of Jacob (Gen. 32 : 1, 2) around whom the 
hosts of God gathered in such form as reminded Jacob of a dou- 
ble camp, and he gave this name to the place, "Mahanaim," dou- 
ble camp. "Are they not all ministering spirits sent forth to 



146 



PSALM XXXIV. 



minister to the heirs of salvation?" (Heb. 1: 12.) God has a 
wonderful wealth of resources for the protection of his people, not 
only in his control over universal providence, but in his celestial 
armies "who excel in strength" (Ps. 103: 20) and are never 
slow to do his pleasure. 

8. O taste and see that the Lord is good : blessed is the 
man that trusteth in him. 

"Taste" — make trial as by tasting. Commit your case to the 
Lord and ye will see that he is faithful and does not fail you. 

9. O fear the Lord, ye his saints : for there is no want 
to them that fear him. 

10. The young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but 
they that seek the Lord shall not want any good thing. 

" Fear," as usual in the sense of filial reverence, not excluding the 
trust and love of simple piety. Whoever fears and trusts thus 
shall lack nothing good. The young lion despite the care of his 
vigilant and powerful mother may suffer hunger,. but God's sons 
and daughters, never. 

11. Come, ye children, hearken unto me: I will teach 
you the fear of the Lord. 

"Ye children" — the address of a teacher to his pupils, or of 

an author to his readers. "I will teach you the fear of the 

Lord," seems here to mean definitely, I will teach you its condi- 
tions — what fearing the Lord implies ; what you must and what 
you must not do, as you would ensure God's protection. In this 
view of his meaning, the cautions that immediately follow have 
special significance as related to his own course before Achish. 

12. "What man is he that desireth life, and loveth many 
days, that he may see good ? 

13. Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips from speak- 
ing guile. 

14. Depart from evil, and do good; seek peace, and 
pursue it. 

Art thou deeply anxious to preserve thine own life for the sake 
of its future enjoyment? Let not this anxious desire tempt thy 
tongue to any wrong or deception. Shun all evil ; do only good ; 
seek peace (" as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all 
men"); and seek it not listlessly but earnestly, following hard after 
it and laboring by all appropriate means to secure it. These pre- 
cautions will help to keep you on the safe side. Do they not hint 
broadly that frankness is better than deception, even in such 
emergencies as that which was before the writer's mind? 

15. The eyes of the Lord are upon the righteous, and 
his ears are open unto their cry. 



PSALM XXXIV. 



147 



16. The face of the Lord is against them that do evil, to 
cut off the remembrance of them from the earth. 

17. The righteous cry, and the Lord heareth, and deliv- 
ereth them out of all their troubles. 

The sympathies of the righteous Lord are with his righteous and 
trustful children, but against tfye doers of evil. Under that ancient 
economy which so largely made retribution a present fact, it was 
God's policy to root out incorrigible sinners from the earth, name 
and memorial, for an example of warning to the ungodly. 

18. The Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken 
heart ; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit. 

The fact that even good men fall into sin and that the best of 
them have the sins of their impenitent life to repent of, make a 
broken heart and a contrite spirit, constituent elements of a pious 
man's character, and standing conditions of God's favor. "To this 
man will I look, even to him that is poor and of a contrite spirit 
and trembleth at my word" (Is. 66: 2). No state of mind other 

than this or unlike this can be right in one who has ever sinned. 

Shall we assume that in this verse David quietly suggests that he 
looked with a sad heart upon his deception before Achish ? Per- 
haps this is not certain ; it is at least possible. 

19. Many are the afflictions of the righteous : but the Lord 
delivereth him out of them all. 

20. He keepeth all his bones : not one of them is broken. 

No human life escapes all suffering and trial ; let it suffice that 
the Lord knows how to deliver every righteous one from any thing 
whatever, that is, on the whole, a real evil, for he can make every 
permitted trial or pain work out the richer results of moral disci- 
pline — submission, obedience, trust. 

21. Evil shall slay the wicked : and they that hate the 
righteous shall be desolate. 

22. The Lord redeemeth the soul of his servants : and 
none of them that trust in him shall be desolate. 

In each of these verses the verb rendered "shall be desolate" 
means, primarily, to be guilty ; and secondarily, to be punished for 
this guilt. All they that hate the righteous are thus held guilty 
and punished ; but never those who reverently and humbly trust 
in him. The ministrations of good or ill through God's providence, 
will sever broadly between the righteous and the wicked. He 
will surely let the world know whom he approves and loves, on 
the one hand, and whom he can not but abhor for their wicked- 
ness, on the other. 



148 



PSALM XXXV. 



PSALM XXXV. 

This Psalm is specially correlated to Ps. 34, inasmuch as that 
presents God's treatment of his friends; this, his treatment of his 
enemies. As that was a suggestion, or -we may call it an outgrowth 
of one prominent fact in David's personal history, so is this also — 
the suggestive fact being that remarkable interview between David 
and Saul, recorded 1 Sam. 24, in which David spared the life of 
his malicious enemy, using language which appears almost verba- 
tum in the opening of this Psalm — "The Lord therefore be judge 
between me and thee, and see and plead my cause, and deliver me 
out of thy hand " (v. 15); and Saul, under the force of truth, was 
compelled to say, " Thou hast rewarded me good, whereas I have 
rewarded thee evil" (v. 17.) The charge of malicious impreca- 
tion has been brought by some against the spirit of David as 
evinced in this Psalm. In answer to this charge, it may be said : 
(1) Let the facts of his history speak for themselves. When Saul 
fell into his power, once (1 Sam. 24) and again (] Sam. 26), did 
David evince any malicious revenge ? Utterly far from it. With 
a magnanimity and spirit of forgiveness almost without a parallel, 
he spared his life and withstood every solicitation to harm even so 
much as a hair of his head. And when Saul ultimately died, there 
was not probably a man in all Israel who bewailed his deserved 

doom with sincerer grief and pity, than David. (2) David had 

a sense of right and wrong, a consciousness of being in the main, 
right, in this pending issue with Saul, and an equally clear con- 
viction that Saul was wrong. He knew he did not anoint himself 
to be Israel's future king; he did not strike for the throne then 
filled by Saul, of his own motion. The God of Israel sent to him 
this call; he was therefore consciously with God in obeying it, 
and his conviction was perfect that Saul was wrong in seeking his 
life because he accepted that call and was waiting God's time of 
fulfilling it. To blame him for this consciousness as to himself 
and this conviction as to Saul, were simply absurd. It would be 
demanding that he should crucify his own moral nature and ignore 
all moral distinctions. God himself can not do this if he would, 
and would not if he could. And shall it be demanded that man 
be more tolerant to wrong or more indifferent to moral distinctions 
than God? David, true to his moral nature, could not love and 
approve wrong-doing; could not wish it to prosper; could not fail 
to pray that it might never prosper ; indeed, that it might never es- 
cape condign punishment, save by the repentance of the guilty doer 

and the safe exercise of divine mercy to the penitent. But (3) 

as to personal retaliation, David did the noblest thing possible for an 
injured man to do, i e., intrust vengeance to the Lord and leave it 
with him to repay. This, it seems to me, is precisely the spirit of 
the Psalm before us. David committed his case to the Lord his God, 
imploring protection against Saul, as most assuredly he had a right 
to do and ought to do ; leaving it with God in his own wisdom and 



PSALM XXXV. 



149 



justice to arrange the whole matter of retribution toward both Saul 
and all his malign enemies. Ought not every good man to rejoice that 
God rules with retributive justice over all evil-doers, and that he 
will take care of the interests of morally right-doing, sustaining 
them by a righteous administration of reward and punishment ? 
To this extent reaches the spirit of David in the Psalm before us; 
no further. 

1. Plead my cause, O Lord, with them that strive with 
me : fight against them that fight against me. 

2. Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand up for 
mine help. 

3. Draw out also the spear, and stop the ivay against 
them that persecute me : say unto my soul, I am thy salva- 
tion. 

The tone of v. 1 is simply, Lord, take my part. I am attacked 
unto death ; do thou come in to withstand my assailants. My 
case is thine; I put it over into thy hands. Go into court with 
me to plead for me against my persecutors: go out to battle to 

fight for me against my assailants. In v. 3, " Stop the way " is 

probably the precise sense of the Hebrew verb, although the word 
for "way" is unexpressed, the original being simply shut or close 
up as to the meeting of my pursuers, L e., block their path, stay 
their coming. 

4. Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek 
after my soul : let them be turned back and brought to con- 
fusion that devise my hurt. 

5. Let them be as chaff before the wind : and let the 
angel of the Lord chase them. 

6. Let their way be dark and slippery : and let the angel 
of the Lord persecute them. 

TThy should they seek my life and plot my ruin ? I deserve it 
not at their hand. The Lord sent Samuel to anoint my head; the 
Lord felled Goliath of Gath under my hand. Shall Saul slay me 

for these things ? The Lord be my Judge and Deliverer ! God's 

angels are sent not only to encamp around the righteous but to 
chase away the wicked. In v. 5, the word for " chase " is literally 
urging, pushing them on, as a mighty wind does the chaff. " Per- 
secute," not in a wrong, malicious sense, but in that of follovnng 
after to execute God's righteous will upon the guilty. A terrible 
doom is this, driven back from their malicious assaults upon the 
good, along a way dark and intensely slippery [Heb., double slip- 
perinesses], and God's angel of retribution crowding hard upon 
their steps ! 

7. For without cause have they hid for me their net in 
a pit, ivhieh without cause they have digged for my soul. 



150 



PSALM XXXV. 



The reasons thereof follow: "/o?*" all their malicious plots 

against me are causeless; on my part unmerited. A pit dug 

with a net spread over it seems to be the precise idea — a net-pit, 
for his life. 

8. Let destruction come upon him at unawares ; and let 
his net that he hath hid catch himself : into that very de- 
struction let him fall. 

Let destruction come upon him ere he knows it [Heb.]. 
Also in the last clause, " with ruin let him mil into it," i. e., let 
it be a fatal fall. 

9. And my soul shall be joyful in the Loed : it shall re- 
joice in his salvation. 

10. All my bones shall say, Loed, who is like unto thee, 
which deliverest the poor from him that is too strong for him, 
yea, the poor and the needy from him that spoileth him ? 

David was no doubt somewhat sensitive to his own well-being ; 
every sentient creature is so by nature ; but this is not all, for the 
interests treasured up in his life were more than his personal hap- 
piness, even the interests of piety and prosperity for Israel. It 
should not be forgotten that David's sufferings from the hand of 
Saul came wholly from the fact that God had called him to the 
throne for the good of Israel, and therefore had treasured up in 
David's life and success all those sacred interests. Let David re- 
joice therefore when God "saves him from his enemies, and not for 
his own sake only but for Zion's sake also. It is to the glory of 
the Infinite Father that he cares for and preserves the defenseless 
and suffering ones in his family against their mightier foes. 
AVell might David say, All my bones chime into the grand choral 
song of praise for such parental care and love! 

11. False witnesses did rise up; they laid to my charge 
things that I knew not. 

12. They rewarded me evil for good to the spoiling of 
my soul. 

"Witnesses of violent, murderous intent, is better than simply 
" false." They' challenge me to answer to charges of which I 
know nothing. The word for "spoiling" is strong — the be- 
reavement of my soul, the stripping me of all things most dear, 
like the death of best friends, and especially that bereavement 
which leaves us widowed and childless. 

13. But as for me, when they were sick, my clothing was 
sackcloth : I humbled my soul with fasting ; and my prayer 
returned into mine own bosom. 

14. I behaved myself as though he had been my friend 
or brother : I bowed down heavily, as one that mourneth 
for his mother. 



PSALM XXXV. 



151 



David paints his own feeling and bearing toward his persecu- 
tors in the strongest contrast with theirs toward him, and so far as 
the history throws light on the case, with entire truth. " Hum- 
bled my soul with fasting" is the usual phrase with the Hebrew 
writers. The verb however has the sense of afflict rather than pre- 
cisely humble, referring to the self-imposed suffering and discom- 
fort of abstinence from food. The last clause of v. 13 is precisely, 

My prayer shall [or let my prayer] return into mine own bosom ; 
let the good I have sought for them, since they requite it only 
with hate and wrong, come back in blessings upon mine own 

soul. Observe the appropriate gradation from remoter friends 

to dearest, "friend," "brother," "mother." 

15. But in mine adversity they rejoiced, and gathered 
themselves together: yea, the abjects gathered themselves 
together against me, and I knew it not ; they did tear ine, 
and ceased not : 

16. With hypocritical mockers in feasts, they gnashed 
upon me with their teeth. 

While the general scope of these verses is clear, some of the par- 
ticular words and clauses are explained by critics variously. " Ad- 
versity " is a halting or stumbling, over which his enemies exulted. 
The word for "abjects" is put by Maurer, fools; by Alexander, 
cripples ; by Gesenius, biters, in the sense of backbiters, i. e., slan- 
derers, which last seems to be favored by the next clause, " and 
I knew it not," i. e. } they slanderously charged against me things 

of which I knew nothing. " They did tear me," i. e., with the 

teeth of slander, in the same sense as our word backbite. As 

buffoons and jesters are employed at some festive tables to make 
sport for the guests, so David's enemies employed slanderers on 
similar occasions to regale the party at his expense. This seems 

to be the best explanation of v. 16.- The word "hypocritical" 

misses the true idea which sets forth rather their intense meanness 

and wickedness. Some critics suppose the allusion to "feasts," 

to signify that these slanderers did their service for bread, i. e. f 
for pay, a livelihood ; others, that it alludes to a usage common in 
their festivities — the latter with most probability. 

17. Lord, how long wilt thou look on ? rescue my soul 
from their destructions, my darling from the lions. 

18. I will give thee thanks in the great congregation : 
I will praise thee among much people. 

How long, Lord, wilt thou look on these things quietly, with no 

indignant protest and resistance? For "my darling," see Ps. 

22: 20, the sense being, my precious life and all that is most 

dear. For such deliverances as I nOw implore, I will praise 

thee before all the people. 

19. Let not them that are mine enemies wrongfully re- 



152 



PSALM XXXVI. 



joice over me : neither let them wink with the eye that 
hate me without a cause. 

20. For they speak not peace : but they devise deceitful 
matters against them that are quiet in the land. 

21. Yea, they opened their mouth wide against me, and 
said, Aha, aha, our eye hath seen it. 

"Wink with the eye" — malicious and scornful. They really 
seek no one's good, but devise mischief against the most inoffen- 
sive. " Our eye hath seen it" i. e., our heart's desire. 

22. Tliis thou hast seen, O Lord : keep not silence : O 
Lord, be not far from me. 

23. Stir up thyself, and awake to my judgment, even 
unto my cause, my God and my Lord. 

. While they say, " Our eye hath seen," I know, O Lord, that 
thou hast seen : now, therefore, keep silence no loDger. Awake to 
my judgment, i. e., to vindicate my cause. 

24. Judge me, O Lokd my God, according to thy 
righteousness ; and let them not rejoice over me. 

25. Let them not say in their hearts, Ah, so would we 
have it : let them not say, We have swallowed him up. 

26. Let them be ashamed and brought to confusion to- 
gether that rejoice at mine hurt : let them be clothed with 
shame and dishonor that magnify themselves against me. 

In the last clause "magnify themselves against me," probably 
means, acting proudly and scornfully toward me. Then the anti- 
thetic use of the same words with reference to God in v. 27 might 
mean. Let the Lord achieve real glory by my deliverance. 

27. Let them shout for joy, and be glad, that favor my 
righteous cause : yea, let them say continually, Let the 
Lord be magnified, which hath pleasure in the prosperity 
of his servant. 

28. And my tongue shall speak of thy righteousness and 
of thy praise all the day long. 

Let all those have occasion to rejoice whose sympathies are 

with me and with righteousness. : "A11 the day long " is not to 

be restricted to one day's joyful thanksgiving, but means, through 
whole days, perpetually. 

oo^Oo 

PSALM XXXVI. 

The particular occasion of this Psalm is not indicated. The 
strain of it suggests however that it was some striking manifesta- 



PSALM XXXVI. 



153 



tion of human depravity and of its amazing power over wicked 
hearts. Having spoken of this in vs. 1-4, he then places in telling 
contrast the opposite qualities in the character of the great God — 
his mercy, faithfulness, loving-kindness, and his marvelously ten- 
der care of his trustful children. The Psalm is attributed to 

David with the rather unusual remark additional — " The servant 
of the Lord," as if to suggest that in these words respecting the 
horrible depravity of man on the one hand, and the wonderful 
goodness and grace of God on the other, he thought and spake as 
a true servant of God, fully in his sympathy and friendship. 

1. The transgression of the wicked saith within my heart, 
that there is no fear of God before his eyes. 

All the critics feel the difficulties of this verse. The Hebrew 
word answering to "saith" is not a verb, but a noun, meaning 
properly an oracle — an utterance either from God himself, or from 
one supposed to be under special inspiration. It is used six 
times of Balaam (Num. 24: 3, 4, 15, 16) within four verses, and 
by David twice of himself as moved to sacred song (2 Sam. 23 : 1). 
It is almost distinctively the word by which the prophetic declara- 
tions of God are indicated and is commonly translated, " Thus saith 
the Lord." In accordance with this usage we have here the sen- 
timent, Depravity is the sinner s oracle. Its impulses have to him 
an authority potent as the voice of God, or at least, as those 
oracular responses which are supposed to come from superhuman 
sources and which command the reverence, the homage and the 
obedience of mankind. The word for " transgression " I trans- 
late depravity, in the sense of the passions, the impulses of sin in 

a depraved soul. Rather than "of the wicked," the Hebrew 

requires the construction, as to the wicked, or to the wicked. The 
love and the passion for sinning have the force of an oracle to the 

wicked man. The word u my" in the clause "within my 

heart" seems very unnatural. The obvious sense of the words 
is — I think so; it seems so to me; but such a statement seems 
uncalled for. I therefore incline strongly to accept the various 
reading which makes it — "in his heart." Then the whole passage 
becomes not only natural and easy, but forcible. Depravity is an 
oracle to the wicked man in his heart; there is no fear of God 
before his eyes. He fears, reverences, and obeys those voices 
from within his heart which prompt him to sin — which call him 
on to more and deeper wickedness ; but the fear of God has no 
such power over his soul. 

2. For he flattereth himself in his own eyes, until his 
iniquity be found to be hateful. 

Here is one reason why he fears not God, but gives heed to the 
impulses of his depravity. He flatters himself — not " until," but 
in reference to the finding out of his iniquity and the hating of it. 
Now since the fear of God is the thing denied of him, the thought 



154 



PSALM XXXYI. 



here must be that he flatters himself God will not find out his 
iniquity to hate and therefore punish it. The word "until "is by 
no means a correct and adequate rendering of the original prepo- 
sition. Under the right construction, the verse gives with sur- 
passing accuracy the philosophy of sinning, viz. : men flatter 
themselves that God will never search out, find, hate, and there- 
fore punish their sin. 

3. The words of his mouth are iniquity and deceit : he 
hath left off to be wise, and to do good. 

4. He deviseth mischief upon his bed; he setteth himself 
in a way that is not good ; he abhorreth not evil. 

He stands aloof from being wise and doing right. " Upon 

his bed," where one's thoughts come welling up from the heart, 
least of all affected by external surroundings, there he is concocting 
schemes of sinning. He plants himself habitually in ways that 
are not good, but bad, and has no repugnance to evil — i. e., he 
really loves it. A dark picture, but not more dark than truthful. 

5. Thy mercy, O Lord, is in the heavens ; and thy 
faithfulness reacheth unto the clouds. 

6. Thy righteousness is like the great mountains; thy 
judgments are a great deep : O Lord, thou preservest man 
and beast. 

The beauty of this Psalm lies in this expressive contrast which 
places the glorious excellencies of Israel's God over against the 
ineffable wickedness and guilt of sinners who throw a loose rein 

upon their depraved impulses. The sense is not # that God's 

mercy is exercised in the heavens in distinction from the earth — 
rather there than here ; but as the parallelism demands, it towers 
high, up to heaven ; it is great and glorious, high as heaven, vast as 
the universe! So of God's "righteousness" and of his "judg- 
ments ; " the strongest expressions are used to indicate their rich- 
ness, depth, and unutterable glory. "Thou preservest," etc., is 

literally, thou savest, or more closely, thou wilt save man and beast, 
prolonging their lives; supplying every natural want; pouring out 
blessings upon them from thy full hand and thus perpetually 

evincing thy glorious benevolence. The future tense expresses 

not only the present fact but the writer's assurance that it will be 
so through all the future. 

7. How excellent is thy loving-kindness, O God! there- 
fore the children of men put their trust under the shadow 
of thy wings. 

Such loving-kindness is a most ample basis for perfect trust. 
The sons of men will put (future tense); they will, for they will 
have most abundant reason for it through all the ages. "Un- 
der the shadow of thy wings" takes its figure from the mother 



PSALM XXXVI. 



155 



bird whose wings are the natural shelter for her young. So she 
draws the little ones close to her warm bosom and spreads over 
them her sheltering wings. Our divine Lord reproduces this 
figure as to even the city of his murderers — " How often would I 
have gathered thy children as a hen doth gather her brood under 
her wings" (Luke 13 : 34). 

8. They shall be abundantly satisfied with the fatness of 
thy house; and thou shalt make them drink of the river 
of thy pleasures. 

9. For with thee is the fountain of life : in thy light 
shall we see light. 

So the Great Father lavishes good upon his creatures and espe- 
cially upon his trustful children. These precious words have their 
really full significance and application only in the line of the 
spiritual blessings which God gives both surely and abundantly to 
those who hunger and thirst after righteousness. All such shall 
be satisfied with the fatness of his house. The family home where 
they dwell under his shadow and sit around his table never lacks 
a royal feast of fat things — a river of God's pleasures never dry — 
a fountain of life-power and life-joy. 

10. O continue thy loving-kindness unto them that know 
thee ; and thy righteousness to the upright in heart. 

Yet such is the wise and admirable plan of God that prayer has 
its place between the promise and the bestowment. "Ask, and ye 
shall receive" is evermore the law of God's spiritual house. -So 
here: "Continue," i. e n prolong, perpetuate thy loving-kindness to 
thy people. Let it never fail. As thou hast said, so let it be ! 

11. Let not the foot of pride come against me, and let 
not the hand of the wicked remove me. 

12. There are the workers of iniquity fallen : they are 
cast down, and shall not be able to rise. 

Let not the foot of pride come down upon me, scornfully tramp- 
ling me under foot ; let not the hand of the wicked make me a 
wanderer ; break me up from my quiet home, and drive me away 

an outcast. In the last ver§e the emphatic form of the word 

there is well put by Dr. Alexander: " There has very much the 
same sense as in common parlance when uttered as a sudden ex- 
clamation: There! they have fallen [already]!" At the mo- 
ment of his prayer, a sense of assured confidence comes over his 
soul ; he sees his prayer answered ; his enemies already prostrate 
and his fears vanished away ! . 



156 



PSALM XXXVII. 



PSALM XXXVII. 

The scope of this Psalm relieves us of all inquiry after a special 
occasion or special circumstances for its composition, inasmuch as 
its views of men are general rather than special. The writer 
looks at many cases under each class — the righteous and the 
wicked, and not exclusively at any particular one. It is a Psalm 
of generalizations and not of specific allusions. David had seen 
more than one case of a wicked man. prosperous for a short time, 
but for a short time only. Xabal crossed his path early, and man- 
ifestly made a deep impression on his mind (1 Sam. 25). The 

central thought of the Psalm is, Let not good men, however much 
afflicted, envy the prosperous wicked, for their prosperity is 
transient. God is against them. God will surely protect and 

bless the righteous, and will speedily cut off the wicked. The 

age when David observed these facts of human life was largely 
one of present retribution on both good men and bad, the wicked 
not living out half their days; the righteous blessed ordinarily 
with length of days and manifold prosperity. It was a wise ar- 
rangement of God's providence to give these present manifestations 
of his moral government over men in those early ages, as a means 
of confirming their faith in the fact that a righteous God reigns 
over this sinning world. It would not have been well to ask men 
to believe in future retribution until he had given them in this 
world some demonstrations of his righteous justice. Hence the 
greater amount of present retribution in the early ages of our 
world than in these later ages. These facts both certify the cor- 
rectness of the doctrine of this Psalm and show its forcible moral 
bearings upon the certainty of retribution in eternity to fill out 
the unfinished retributions of time. 

1. .Fret not thyself because of evil doers, neither be thou 
envious against the workers of iniquity. 

2. For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and 
wither as the green herb. 

"Fret not;" [Hebrew] be not excited, heated; let not your 
heart wax hot as you think of the prosperity of evil doers. For 
their glory soon passes away, even as the cut grass and the green 
herb of summer are soon dry — for the fires of the oven. This is 
one among many reasons against fretfulness and envy in view of 
the prosperity of the wicked, yet alone it is all-sufficient. Their 
prosperity is too short to be rationally envied. If you see their 
whole case you can not be so foolish as to wish it were your own. 

3. Trust in the Lord, and do good ; so shalt thou dwell 
in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. 

All these verbs are in form imperative: "trust; do good: dwell 
in the land; feed on truth." But according to the usual Hebrew 



PSALM XXXVII. 



157 



idioin, the last two are legitimately promise, as in our English ver- 
sion. "Do good," in the broad sense of doing right in all re- 
spects. "Dwell in the land," i. e., of promise, Canaan, long the 

cherished desire of the children of Abraham. Not " shalt be 

fed," for the verb is not passive but transitive, and the object 
after it is expressed, viz,, truth — God's faithful promises. On 
these let thy soul feed in quiet, patient hope. Consequently the 
primary sense here is not of earthly bread but of the bread of 
heaven. The earthly is not expressed yet may be implied. The 
greater includes the less. 

4. Delight thyself also in the Lord ; and he shall give 
thee the desires of thine heart. 

"Delight thyself;" be happy in God; let it suffice thee that 
thou hast such a friend. Enjoy his friendship; do him the honor 
of manifesting your confidence in him, your affection for him, 
your full and abundant satisfaction in having one rich and noble 
friend, so wise, so kind, so good that you are forever blest in his 

love and friendship. The friends of God sometimes need this 

admonition. Alas, that they should so often dishonor their great 
Father by not really delighting themselves in his friendship, and 

in the glorious qualities of his character. There is a promise 

to those who obey this word : " He will give thee the desires of 
thy heart." Joyfully trust him; then will he joyfully bless thee. 
Make your soul happy in loving and obeying him; he will not 
crush out that joy, but will rejoice to fulfill the large desires of 
your heart. 

5. Commit thy way unto the Lord ; trust also in him ; 
and he shall bring it to pass. 

6. And he shall bring forth thy righteousness as the light, 
and thy judgment as the noonday. 

The word for "commit" means primarily to roll Roll thy way 
upon the Lord; devolve upon him the burdens of life, yet in the sense 
not of laying off all personal responsibility, but of throwing yourself 
in your weakness upon his strong arm for your needed strength. 
The same word occurs in the same sense in Ps. 22 : 8, said there of 
the Messiah : He rolled himself upon the Lord to be delivered. Also, 
Prov. 16: 3: " Roll thy work upon the Lord" — for the help you 
need to do it both easily and well. A different verb with the same 
sense appears in Ps. 55: 22: "Cast thy burden on the Lord;" 
literally, cast upon the Lord what he gives thee to bear, etc. Peter 
(1 Eps. 5: 17) has the same precious thought: "Casting all your 

care upon him, for he careth for you."- "Thy way" might of 

itself naturally take the sense : thy general course of life considered 
as shaped, determined, by the agencies of divine providence. But 
the whole current of the parallel passages favors the sense: thy 
way of duty — the things that devolve upon thee to do. The last 
clause of v. 5 favors this sense : The Lord will accomplish, will 



158 



PSALM XXXVII. 



aid you to do that thing first expressed under the word "way." 
V. 6 means, He will vindicate thy reputation before the world — a 
thought specially dear to David whom his enemies, particularly 
Saul, maligned and traduced grievously. 

7. Rest in the Lobd, and wait patiently for him: fret 
not thyself because of him who prospereth in his way, be- 
cause of the man who bringeth wicked devices to pass. 

8. Cease from anger, and forsake wrath : fret not thyself 
in any wise to do evil. 

" Rest," the original word suggesting a calm, quiet trust, since 
its primary sense is to be silent Yet the next verb, translated 
"wait patiently," suggests an earnest mind toward God. (SeePs. 
• 40: 1, and notes there). If the wicked seem to prosper, leave 

their case with God and keep your spirit calm and cool. The 

clause (v. 8), "Fret not thyself in any wise to do evil," should 
read, "Fret not thyself — only to the doing of evil;" i. e., fretting 
tends only to evil-doing; can have no other result save to ensnare 
thee into sin. 

9. For evil doers shall be cut off : but those that wait 
upon the Lokd, they shall inherit the earth. 

10. For yet a little while, and the wicked shall not be: 
yea, thou shalt diligently consider his place, and it shall 
not be. 

11. But the meek shall inherit the earth ; and shall de- 
light themselves in the abundance of peace. 

The contrasted ideas are — on the one hand, evil-doers shall soon 
be cut off by death ; on the other, the righteous shall dwell long 

on the land of God's promise. The word "earth" means the 

land, i. <?., of Canaan. " They shall inherit the land " came into 
common use during the long years of their waiting in faith for the 
promised land, while the patriarchs were strangers in it or exiled 

from it in Egypt or the wilderness of Arabia. The " meek" — 

the same who (in v. 9) " wait on the Lord," — are the humble and 
unaspiring whose souls are really contrite and lowly before God. 
Our Lord in his sermon (Matt. 5 : 5) quotes this very lan- 
guage : " The meek shall inherit the land " — children of promise. 

12. The wicked plotteth against the just, and gnasheth 
upon him with his teeth. 

13. The Lord shall laugh at him : for he seeth that his 
day is coming. 

"Gnasheth" — expressing strongly his malign, revengeful spirit. 
" The Lord shall laugh at him." as said in Ps. 2 : 4, suggest- 
ing God's infinite contempt for his puny endeavors, and his con- 
sciousness of boundless resources for the sinner's punishment and 



PSALM XXXVII. 



150 



destruction. The reason assigned here looks to this — " for he 
sceth that his day is coming " — the day of swift retribution upon 
the guilty. 

14. The wicked have drawn* out the sword, and have 
bent their bow, to cast down the poor and needy, and to 
slay such as be of upright conversation. 

15. Their sword shall enter into their own heart, and 
their bows shall be broken. 

"Those of upright conversation" is in Hebrew simply, "the up- 
right of way," i. e., of life generally. This sense of the word 
"conversation" is now obsolete. Anciently, like the Latin word 
from which it comes, it meant one's way of life. It is now re- 
stricted to the intercommuication of thought in speech. The 

violence they plot against the righteous recoils upon themselves to 
their ruin. See the case of Haman in the story of Esther. 

16. A little that a righteous man hath is better than the 
riches of many wicked. 

17. For the arms, of the wicked shall be broken : but the 
Lord upholdeth the righteous. 

The word for "riches" suggests the tumult, commotion, and un- 
rest that are associated with the wealth of the wicked. "Arms" 

in the literal sense, but implying their power of useful labor. 

18. The Lord knoweth the days of the upright : and 
their inheritance shall be forever. 

19. They shall not be ashamed in the evil time : and in 
the days of famine they shall be satisfied. 

The Lord is always cognizant of the days of the upright. Their 
whole life, every moment of it, is under his watchful and perfect 
eye. He • will make their inheritance of blessings permanent, 
meaning primarily, they shall dwell in his land of promise all their 

days. "Be ashamed," here, as usual, in the sense of being put 

to shame by disappointment of their hope, the failure of that on 
which they rely. When all the land suffers in famine, they shall 
have enough. 

20. But the wicked shall perish, and the enemies of the 
Lord shall be as the fat of lambs : they shall consume ; into 
smoke shall they consume away. 

In the clause, "the fat of lambs," the modern lexicons concur 
in the sense, The glory of the pastures, according to the figure in 
v. 2. The word rendered "fat"* means preciousness, that which 
is most precious, which may possibly be used of the most precious 
part of lambs. The word for lamb has this sense usually, but 



160 



PSALM XXXVII. 



may bear the sense of pasture, as in Isaiah 30: 23, and Ps. 65 : 14. 
The strong reason for the construction of our English version is 
that the burning of lambs, as in sacrifice, seems to be the figure 
before the mind as shown in the context. The other con- 
struction supposes a change of figure. In either construction the 
sense is substantially the same, the fearful destruction of the 
■wicked. 

21. The wicked borroweth, and payeth not again : but 
the righteous showeth mercy, and giveth. 

22. For such as be blessed of him shall inherit the earth ; 
and they that be cursed of him shall be cut off. 

"The borrower is servant to the lender" (Prov. 22: 7). It was 
a feature in the prosperity of an obedient people as it stands in 
the words of Moses, that they should be lenders, not borrowers. 
•'Thou shalt lend to many nations, but thou shalt not borrow" 
(Deut. 15 : 6, and 28 : 12). Hence the strain of these verses is 
primarily of ability, rather than moral honesty. The wicked are 
needy, dependent; live by borrowing. The righteous have the 
means to give and the heart also. "For" (assigning the reason) 
those whom God blesses hold the land and abide in prosperity; 
but the accursed of God are soon cut off in death ; perhaps thrust 
out of the communion and excluded from the blessings of the 

covenant people. Moreover it is implied that the wicked deserve 

this doom for their dishonesty. 

23. The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord : 
and he delighteth in his way. 

24. Though he fall, he shall not be utterly cast down : 
for the Lord upholdeth him with his hand. 

God's providence reaches every minutest thing. Every several 
step, each setting down of the foot, is shaped and determined of 
God in the case of the good man. God feels a personal interest 
in the way he shall go. If he chance to fall, it is not serious ; is 
never an utter prostration, for God never remits his care ; never 
lets go his upholding hand. 

25. I have been young, and now am old ; yet have I not 
seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread 

Literally, "I have been young; also have been old," and there- 
fore have had long years of observation ; but I have never seen 
the righteous forsaken of God. He makes all things work together 
for good to those who love and trust him. His posterity also are 
blessed and never brought to beg their bread. In those ages pre- 
eminently, God manifested his favor to his people by means of 
earthly and present good. 

26. He is ever merciful, and lendeth ; and his seed is 
blessed. 



PSALM XXXVII. 



161 



27. Depart from evil, and do good ; and dwell for ever- 
more. 

28. For the Lord loveth judgment, and forsaketh not his 
saints; they are preserved forever: but the seed of the 
wicked shall be cut off. 

29. The righteous shall inherit the land, and dwell therein 
forever. 

The staple thoughts of the Psalm are reiterated. 

30. The mouth of the righteous speaketh wisdom, and 
his tongue talketh of judgment. 

31. The law of his God is in his heart ; none of his steps 
shall slide. 

From the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks, so that 
you may know the good man who fear and loves God by the free 
utterance of his most cherished thoughts. God will uphold such 
a man so that none of his steps shall slide as if on an unstable 
foundation. 

32. The wicked watcheth the righteous, and seeketh to 
slay him. 

33. The Lord will not leave him in his hand, nor con- 
demn him when he is judged. 

34. Wait on the Lord, and keep his way, and he shall 
exalt thee to inherit the land : when the wicked are cut off, 
thou shalt see it. 

David wrote these words from his own experience as well as 
from a large field of personal observation. Saul had long watched 
him to slay him ; he had lived to see Saul's mournful death, and 
himself exalted to the highest place over the Lord's land and 
people. 

35. I have seen the wicked in great power, and spread- 
ing himself like a green bay tree. 

36. Yet he passed away, and, lo, he was not: yea, I 
sought him, but he could not be found. 

He seems to speak of some one individual, a giant in power and 
wickedness, and withal spreading himself for a time for wider mis- 
chief. -Of the " green bay tree," the original gives us only these 

ideas — a green tree never transplanted but spreading itself abroad 
in its birth-place. The " bay tree " is the laurel ; but I see nothing 

in the Hebrew word to indicate this species in particular. Even 

this mighty sinner, a terror to all, passed suddenly away. I sought 

him in his old place, but there was nothing left of him. Some 

of those who favor the doctrine of the future annihilation of the 
wicked think to find support in these verses ; and also in vs. 20, 38. 
They should be reminded that David speaks of the present life, not 



162 



PSALM XXXVIII. 



of the future ; of the wicked disappearing from among the living 
here, not of their condition as living or not living there. It is 
simply absurd to make David say : " I sought him through the 
other world as well as this; I sought him in Sheol or in Paradise, 
and could find him nowhere ! " This would be putting a sense into 
his words that he never dreamed of. 

37. Mark the perfect man, and behold the upright : for 
the end of that man is peace. 

38. But the transgressors shall be destroyed together : the 
end of the wicked shall be cut off. 

Once more David draws the contrast and calls upon the reader 
to mark it well. The upright man lives and dies in peace — peace 
to the very end of his mortal days, and with a blessed hope of im- 
mortality which has perfected the peace and rest of his soul to his 
dying hour, and which a faithful God will by no means disappoint. 
But the end of the wicked, such men as he contemplates and in 
that age, is, to be cut off by a violent death, a testimony to the 
righteous retribution of God's providence here, and a precursor of 
more retribution yet to be filled out in the world to come. 

39. But the salvation of the righteous is of the Lord : 
he is their strength in the time of trouble. 

40. And the Lord shall help them, and deliver them : 
he shall deliver them from the wicked, and save them, be- 
cause they trust in him. 

Most appropriately this Psalm closes by ascribing this wonder- 
ful salvation of the righteous, not to his personal merit, or to his 
efficiency in saving himself, but to the Lord alone, his strength in 
all trouble, his helper and deliverer against all evils and perils, 
whether of body or soul, whether material or spiritual. In this, 
David speaks in harmony with the feelings and convictions of 
every truly righteous man. It is their perpetual joy to ascribe 
their help here and their salvation both here and hereafter to the 
glorious Lord alone. 

PSALM XXXVIII. 

This Psalm is plaintive. David is a sufferer, (a) from sickness 
(vs. 1-8, 10); (b) from the desertion of friends (v. 11); (c) from 
the causeless, malign persecution of enemies (vs. 12-20). Three 
times the strain of the Psalm turns from describing his afflictions to 

prayer for divine help, viz., vs. 9, 15, and 21, 22. The author or 

compiler puts at the head of this Psalm the word, " to remind" leav- 
ing us to determine from the scope of the Psalm whether this 
means that David put these words on record to remind himself in 
future years of his bitter .experience ; or put them in the form of 



PSALM XXXVIII. 



163 



sacred song and prayer to remind Jehovah of his trials, his con- 
fessions of sin and ill-desert, and of his cries for help. The 
reader will readily see that although the former may often be a 
worthy reason for a journal or diary of any sad experience, yet in 
this case the current strain of the Psalm is altogether of the 
second sort, bringing before God his bitter sufferings as a foun- 
dation of prayer for divine help. Obviously it is admissible in 
prayer to spread out our case before the Lord as David does in 
this Psalm, not by any means assuming that the Lord has forgot- 
ten any of the points, and needs therefore to be reminded, nor 
that he does not know every feature whether of his sufferings or 
of his penitence for sin without David s saying a word. • But that 
prayer may be prayer, God invites us to lay our case before him 
as a child before his human father — a gracious condescension to 
our weakness, and not an expedient on his part for gaining infor- 
mation not otherwise in his possession. There is at least a 

fair measure of probability in the supposition that this Psalm and 
also the next following were written very late in David's life, on 
the occasion of the conspiracy of Adonijah. See remarks intro- 
ductory to Ps. 39. 

1. O Lord, rebuke me not in thy wrath : neither chas- 
ten me in thy hot displeasure. 

2. For thine arrows stick fast in me, and thy hand 
presseth me sore. 

David fully recognizes his suffering from sickness as a chastening 
by the arrows of the Almighty, in faithful discipline for his sin. 

He prays that the Lord would mercifully stay his hand. "Stick 

fast" carries the thought somewhat beyond the original, which 
means only that they sink deep, press heavily ; and not that they 
can not be easily extracted. The verbs translated "stick fast" 
and "presseth sore," are the same, save that one is passive in form 
and the other not. 

3. TJiere is no soundness in my flesh because of thine, 
anger ; neither is there any rest in my bones because of my 
sin. 

4. For mine iniquities are gone over mine head : as a 
heavy burden they are too heavy for me. 

5. My wounds stink and are corrupt because of my 
foolishness. 

I see no good reason to doubt that these verses and others in 
this Psalm (e. g.,\s. 7, 8, 10) describe bodily disease. The expres- 
sions are strong, perhaps poetically so. A prosaic statement might 

qualify them somewhat. " Mine iniquities gone over my head," 

suppose him in figure, sinking in deep and drowning waters. 
Changing the figure, they are a burden upon him, insupportable, 
crushing. His wounds, i. e., bodily pains, considered as the 



164 



PSALM XXXVIII. 



infliction of God's chastisements, are suppurating and offensive 
because of his folly in the sense of sin. The choice of this word, 
"folly," to denote the sin for which God smote him, seems to 
suggest that his sin was morally no less loathsome and disgusting 
than his diseased and putrid body — a natural correlation between 
the moral offense and the physical penalty for it. 

6. I am troubled ; I am bowed down greatly ; I go 
mourning all the day long. 

7. For my loins are filled with a loathsome disease : and 
there is no soundness in my flesh. 

8. I am feeble and sore broken : I have roared by reason 
of the disquietness of my heart. 

The first verb means, I have writhed in pain. I walk about as 

a mourner all the day, as one bearing a heavy affliction. My 

loins are filled with inflammation, burning heat. "I am feeble," 

is made in the original more definite. 1 am cold, vitality gone. 

"Roared" might as well have been sighed, groaned. 

9. Lord, all my desire is before thee ; and my groaning 
is not hid from thee. 

All these fearful sufferings and all the longing desire I feel to 
be delivered from them are before thine eye. Let that eye look 
in compassion upon me and thine ear listen to my sad plaint of 
woe. 

10. My heart panteth, my strength faileth me: as for 
the light of mine eyes, it also is gone from me. 

"My heart palpitates," beating with swift motion. Disease or 
grief produces blindness. 

11. My lovers and my friends stand aloof from my sore ; 
and my kinsmen stand afar off. 

12. They also that seek after my life lay snares for me; 
and they that seek my hurt speak mischievous things, and 
imagine deceits all the day long. 

Those who have loved and befriended me stand afar from me 

thus smitten of God — literally, stand afar from my smiting. 

"Imagine deceits;" they devise deceitful measures to destroy me. 
The original may mean either devise or utter, as in the parallel 
clause we have "speak." 

13. But I, as a deaf man, heard not ; and I was as a 
dumb man that openeth not his mouth. 

14. Thus I was as a man that heareth not, and in whose 
mouth are no reproofs. 

15. For in thee, O Lord, do I hope: thou wilt hear, O 
Lord my God. 



PSALM XXXVIIL 



1G5 



In v. 13, the verbs for ''heard" and "openeth" are both in the 
future tense, and should be taken therefore, as expressing his 
deliberate purpose, thus : But (I said) as a deaf man I will not 
hear, I will be as one dumb who will not open his mouth. I will 
bear it all meekly, with not one word of retort, not one sharp 
reply or complaint. The reason appears in v. 15 : For in thee, 
Lord, do I hope. Vengeance belongeth to the Lord ; I commit 
its visitation on mine enemies to him alone. This becomes 
naturally a powerful plea for the interposition of his God. The 
spirit of it is admirable. God will never be slow to manifest his 
approbation of it. 

16. For I said, Hear me, lest otherwise they should 
rejoice over me :' when my foot slippeth they magnify 
themselves against me. 

17. For I am ready to halt, and my sorrow is continu- 
ally before me. 

The italic words, " Hear me, v "otherwise" may be dispensed 
with by the following not unnatural construction : " For I have 
spoken," (i. e., to Thee) "lest they should exult over me." To 
which he adds ; When my foot slipped they did magnify themselves 
against me, and therefore I could not but know their temper and 

spirit. "Ready to halt," to limp, moving as one disabled, 

lame. 

18. For I will declare mine iniquity ; I will be sorry for 
my sin. 

In view of these afflictions I do not claim to be. sinless, nor do I 
refuse to take blame to myself. On the contrary I publicly confess 
my iniquity; I deplore my sin — a vitally important part of true 
prayer in a case like this. 

19. But mine enemies are lively, and they are strong : 
and they that hate me wrongfully are multiplied. 

20. They also that render evil for good are mine adver- 
saries ; because I follow the thing that good is. 

In the phrase, "mine enemies are lively," the Hebrew word* 
must mean either living or life, and by no means "lively," in the 
sense of spry, nimble. On the whole I prefer the construction, 
enemies as to life, those who seek my life ; my mortal enemies ; 
the whole verse amounting to this : My mortal enemies are strong 
[Hebrew, bony, powerful] ; those who hate me wrongfully are 

many. Disregarding the Hebrew accents we might arrange 

v. 20 : " Men rendering evil for good will hate me because I follow 
good." With proper regard for the accents, thus : "And they are 
requiting evil for good; they will hate me because of my following 
good." The ultimate meaning is essentially the same. 



8 



166 



PSALM XXXIX. 



21. Forsake me not, O Lord : O mj God, be not far 
from me. 

22. Make haste to help me, O Lord my salvation. 

All these points in his case and not least the outrageous wicked- 
ness of his persecutors give force to his final prayer that God would 
neither forsake nor remain at distance, but hasten speedily to his 
succor and salvation. 

PSALM XXXIX. 

This Psalm, ascribed to David, is assigned to the care of Jedu- 
thun, as were Ps. 62 and 77 also. This name is often associated 
with Heman in the historical books, both being prominent in the 

service of song. (Compare 1 Chron. 16 : 41, 42, and 25 : 1-6.) 

The scope, the real animus, of this Psalm seems to me not perfectly 
clear. AVe naturally ask, What are those painful thoughts, welling 
up from the depths of his soul which he restrains himself from 
uttering in the presence of the wicked ? Why this self-imposed 
restraint ? Were these thoughts morally right, or morally wrong ? 
If right, why should it be wrong or even unwise to express them ? 
If wrong, why should he indulge them in his soul even secretly ? 

or at least, why make them a theme of sacred song ? Under 

what circumstances was the Psalm written? At what period in 
David's life ? Is any clue afforded by the circumstances and date 
which may aid us to solve the enigmas, throwing light upon the 

otherwise dark points of the Psalm ? Of the opinions on these 

various points which I here advance it seems proper to say that 
while I hold them with only a moderate measure of confidence, 
I deem them more satisfactory than any other views that have 
been before me. I hope they are at least an approximation 

toward absolute truth. Let it now be assumed that the date 

of the writing was very near the close of his life. The last 
verse suggests this forcibly ; "0 spare me, that I may recover 
strength, before I go hence, and be no more !" We may avail our- 
selves of the brief historical facts of this period found 1 Kings 1 
and 2 : " David was old and stricken in years ; they covered him 
with clothes, but he gat no heat," The vital forces were low; the 
living tire had almost gone out from his once vigorous frame. Xew 
trials are sprung upon him. Another son, a younger brother of the 
heartless, selfish Absalom, had struck for the scepter; Joab the old 
chieftain and Abiathar of high rank in the priesthood, were with 
Adonijah in this uprising. David sees at a glance the perils of 
this crisis ; he feels its stern demands upon him for his utmost 
energies. It agonizes him that his physical powers are so far gone 
and so unequal to the struggle with such adversaries. A painful 
sense of the shortness of life and of the frailty of man comes over 
him, and he can scarcely repress the feeling of rebellion against 



PSALM XXXIX. 



167 



these ordinations of providence. If we study carefully the 

words of Hezekiah, when he looked death in the face under a 
somewhat similar sense of his responsibility as king, and a like 
solicitude to meet them and do much more life-work before he 
should lay his scepter down in death, we shall perhaps understand 
better how David felt in this emergency. It would seem from the 
language in this Psalm that David had more thoughts and other 
than he felt it wise to utter ; especially before the wicked. Very 
probably there were some that he did not altogether like to meet 
and contemplate calmly in his solitude. His soul was troubled, we 
may suppose, not merely with the trying facts of his case, but with 
his own emotions and moral feelings under their pressure. These 
suppositions seem to account fairly for the language before us in 

this Psalm.- The theory suggested in Smith's Dictionary as to 

the date and occasion of this Psalm, viz. : the scenes of Ziklag 
(1 Sam. 30), seems to me far less adequate than the above to meet 
the facts indicated here. At that point David was neither sick, 
infirm, nor apparently near death, but on the contrary, vigorous, 
and full of courage in his God (1 Sam. 30 : 6). 

1. I said, I will take heed to my ways, that I sin not with 
my tongue : I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while the 
wicked is before me. 

2. I was dumb with silence, I held my peace, even from 
good ; and my sorrow was stirred. 

Somewhat more literally we might translate : " I said, Let me 
restrain my ways [myself] from misusing the tongue; let me 
restrain my mouth with a curb so long as the wicked are before 

me." " I held my peace even from good" is taken by some to mean, 

from saying even good things ; but will bear a slightly different 
construction, viz. : from speaking before the good; i. e., I held in 
my words in the presence not only of the wicked, but of the good 
as well. I rigorously suppressed all utterance of my troubled 
thoughts, and consequently my sorrows were deeply stirred — 
troubled the Hebrew has it. 

3. My heart was hot within me ; while I was musing the 
fire burned : then spake I with my tongue. 

Giving no vent to this inward fire, his heart became hot within, 
past endurance he would seem to imply. While he thought and 
did nothing but think, the fire burned the more, and then he 
" spake with his tongue" — the very thing he had previously resolved 
not to do. 

4. Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure 
of my days, what it is ; that I may know how frail I am. 

5. Behold, thou hast made my days as a handbreadth ; 
and my age is as nothing before thee : verily every man at 
his best state is altogether vanity. Selah. 



168 



PSALM XXXIX. 



These words admit a construction which consists with reverence 
toward God and is every way morally appropriate ; and on the 
other hand they might be uttered in a tone and for a purpose very 
exceptionable. The prayer — ''Impress me with a just sense of 
human frailty" — no man need apologize for making. But it may 
be quite another thing to say, " Lord, open to me this strange and 
hard mystery of my short life ; tell me why it is that thou givest 
me days by handbreadths only — that my whole life is as nothing 
before thee, and that every man is made to be only an utter vanity. 
Why is all this ?" 

6. Surely every man walketh in a vain show : surely they 
are disquieted in vain : he heapeth up riches, and knoweth 
not who shall gather them. 

The word translated " surely" has commonly the sense of only. 
Only as a vanishing shadow does the mighty man live ; only in 
vain do they toil and groan. One heaps up riches, but knows not 
who shall appropriate them. This is at best a somber view of life. 
As already remarked, it might ail be said (possibly) in a reverent 
spirit, submissively accepting these ordinations of providence as 
necessarily and indeed justly incident to a world of sin and con- 
sequent mortality and death. But this strong setting forth of the 
vanity of all human life might also be made in the spirit of dis- 
satisfied questioning, not to say of unsuppressed complaint. The 
very strength of these representations of the vanity of life, coupled 
with the questioning tone as if no good answer could be given, and 
with the further indications of a consciousness that these thoughts 
ought never to be spoken before the wicked or even the good, seems 
to me to favor strongly the latter construction. 

7. And now, Lord, what wait I for ? my hope is in thee. 
Here the religious feeling appears coming up again to power. 

Where is my hope and my refuge under the pressure of these sore 
afflictions ? In God only. What else can I wait and hope for ? 
Nothing else in all the universe ; nothing else can bring me relief 
in this emergency. O my. God, do not forsake me; my only hope 
is in thee. 

8. Deliver me from all my transgressions : make me not 
the reproach of the foolish. 

9. I was dumb, I opened not my mouth ; because thou 
didst it. 

From all my sins deliver me ; even from these sins of my repining 
heart and of my unrestrained tongue. Let me not be an object of 
reproach to men like Nabal, more wicked than foolish, or rather 
foolish in the sense of wicked. [The Hebrew word is Nabal.] 
David saw that if God should fail him in this emergency, Adonijah 
and Joab and their associates would exult over him as one aban- 
doned of his God and of his prestige of power. " I am dumb 



PSALM XXXIX. 



169 



and I will not open my mouth, for thou hast done it all." I have 
said too much ; I can make no apology for my hasty complaining 
words. I will not open my mouth in self-vindication, much less in 
any more complaint against God, for all this vanity of human life 
is the ordination of thine own providence. I see thy hand in it 

all. "Will not open" precisely represents the Hebrew tense. 

" Thou hast done it," makes the word thou emphatic, the Hebrew 
pronoun being expressed for emphasis. It is God's own hand. 
How strangely was I beside myself to question the wisdom or the 
right of what thou hast done ! 

10. Kemove thy stroke away from me: I am consumed 
by the blow of thine hand. 

This is prayer that God would lift off his heavy hand and stay 
this sore infliction. Perhaps there underlies it a fresh sense of 
having doubly forfeited God's favor by thoughts and words Avhich 
his conscience now condemns. 

11. When thou with rebukes dost correct man for in- 
iquity, thou makes t his beauty to consume away like a 
moth : surely every man is vanity. Selah. 

If thou shalt still rebuke me as I consciously deserve, I perish 
utterly. If thy rebukes correct me for mine iniquity, I can not 

stand before thee. Let mercy prevail, O my God ! In the last 

clause, u surely " is better read only. Every man is only vanity ; 
nothing better : nothing else. 

12. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear unto my 
cry ; hold not thy peace at my tears : for I am a stranger 
with thee, and a sojourner, as all my fathers were. 

This is pleading for mercy. "Be not silent to my tears." 

"A stranger and sojourner" builds a plea for sparing mercy upon 
the very frailty of his earthly life. I have at best but few days to 
live ; like all my fathers I only sojourn here for a day. 0 let me 
find a few hours more of thy sparing mercy ! See the same words 
1 Chron. 29 : 15, where they stand historically near the close of 
David's life. / 

13. O spare me, that I may recover strength, before I 
go hence, and be no more. 

" Spare me," in the Hebrew, signifies, avert thy face, thought of 

as stern and frowning. "Kecover strength" has in the original 

the usual if not uniform sense of putting on a cheerful counte- 
nance. Sentiment; that my face my brighten up before I go hence 
and be no more. 



170 



PSALM XL. 



PSALM XL. 

If we were to classify or grade the Psalms supposed to be 
prophetic of Christ according to the amount of evidence which 
sustains their Messianic character, we might put in the first class 
those which, in addition to other evidence, indicate him by name, 
e. g., Ps. 110: "The Lord said unto my Lord;" Ps. 2: "I have 
set my King," etc. ; " Thou art my Son," etc. ; " Kiss the Son," etc. ; 
Ps. 45 : " Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever ; " i% Therefore, O 

God, hath thy God anointed Thee," etc., etc. We might put 

into a second class those in which no distinctive name appears but 
which were manifestly regarded by the apostles as Messianic ; 
which moreover admit, in all their points, of legitimate reference to 
him, and which have some points not easily or perhaps not possi- 
bly referable to David or any other mere man. In this class we 

may put Ps. 16, 22, and 40. A third class may comprise those 

from which quotations are made by the apostles and applied to 
Christ, yet not in argument and not in a way to show that they 
certainly referred the Psalm to Christ, but only that they found 
language which might be fitly, perhaps forcibly, applied to his 
case. Ps. 69 may represent this class. It contains nothing that 
may not readily be applied to David; nothing therefore that dis- 
tinctively defines it to be Messianic. 1 have thrown out at this 

point these proximate hints toward a classification for the sake of 
locating the Psalm before us close upon the dividing line which 
runs between the Messianic and the non-Messianic. The amount 
of Messianic evidence is less in it than in any other Psalm which 
I would regard as Messianic. Yet this evidence is in my judg- 
ment sufficient to justify its location in this class. Naturally 
therefore it has difficult points which need to be discussed with 

candor and thoroughness. The strong proofs of its reference to 

Christ lie in vs. 6-8, viz., in the points made in these verses and in 
the application of them to Christ by the writer to the Hebrews 
(10: 5-10). Hence these proofs are made up jointly of the au- 
thority of this writer as inspired, and of the pertinence of the 
points made in this passage to Christ and Christ only. In gen- 
eral we may say of the other points made in the Psalm that, while 
they might apply to David, they might also under a fair construc- 
tion apply equally well to Christ. Therefore the whole Psalm 
should be referred to Christ. I can not accept the interpretation 
of those who rend the Psalm asunder at the close of v. 11, or in- 
deed at any other point, and apply what precedes to Christ and 
what follows to David ; nor can I admit the double-sense interpre- 
tation which would apply the same identical words to both David 
and Christ, assuming that certain of the ideas couched under 
those words are for David only, or as the case may be, for Christ 
only, and certain other ideas, for David and Christ both. This 
doctrine of interpreting Messianic prophecy must be responsible 
for having done much to impair, not to say destroy, the confidence 



PSALM XL. 



171 



of sober, intelligent minds in all prophecy. There is a more ex- 
cellent way. As to the date and suggestive occasion of this 

Psalm, its location in this group of four (38-41), and its numerous 
points of analogy with the other three of the group, strongly favor 
the same date and surroundings. This supposition does not mili- 
tate in the least against its exclusive reference to the Messiah, for 
in all the cases where the spirit of prophecy led David to speak 
of his greater Son, he first brought strongly before his mind those 
points of his own history which were suggestive — we might say, 
typical — of like features in the history, sufferings, and work of 
Christ. We see this in those Psalms which treat of the reigning 
Messiah (e. g., Ps. 2 and 110); also in those which present a suf- 
fering Messiah, viz., Ps. 16, 22, and therefore naturally Ps. 40. 

1. I waited patiently for the Lord ; and he inclined 
unto me, and heard my cry. 

2. He brought me up also out of a horrible pit, out of 
the miry clay, and set my feet upon a rock, and established 
my goings. 

3. And he hath put a new song in my mouth, even praise 
unto our God : many shall see it, and fear, and shall trust 
in the Lord. 

The words "patient," "patiently," have chiefly lost their original 
meaning in English, and a secondary one has become the primary. 
"Patient," from the Latin u patiens" originally meant a sufferer. 
The. doctor's "patient" holds this idea still; and we also speak of 
Christ's "passion," not as we speak of a passionate man, but 
purely in the old sense of his suffering. But in almost all connec- 
tions we drop the old idea of suffering, and think only of quiet 
endurance, long-suffering, making prominent the idea of quietness 
and self-control. In our passage we must go back to the original 
sense suffer. "I waited sufferingly, intensely, with earnest longings, 
an intensity of feeling which amounted to real suffering." This 
was what our translators meant to express and according to the 
usage of their times, did express. The Hebrew idiom also gives 
the idea of intense waiting, a longing, which involved very strong 

emotion. This waiting on God was not in vain, for "he bowed 

his ear unto me and heard my cry," i. e n to answer and to save. 
I was sinking as one in a deep pit and in miry clay; he lifted 
me out and set my feet on rock, and made my goings firm. This 
was equivalent to putting a new song into my mouth, giving me 
occasion to praise him for new mercies. Many shall see this 
gracious deliverance, and learn from it to trust in Jehovah for 
their own salvation from all their straits and perils.— — If now the 
question be asked whether this can refer to Jesus in his human 
nature and relations, the answer must be affirmative. Did he not 
give decisive intimations of a most intense and suffering attitude of 
waiting upon God in prayer and strong crying ? Did he not say, 



172 



PSALM XL. 



"I have a baptism to be baptized with, and how am I straitened 
till it be accomplished?" Have we not read in his history of one 
whole night of prayer to God? Can we forget the scenes of "s : ad 
Gethsemane?" Need we be reminded that the writer to the He- 
brews alludes to "the days of his flesh" when he had offered prayer 
and supplication with strong crying and tears unto him that was 
able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared? 
(Heb. 5:7.) 

4. Blessed is that man that niaketh the Lokd his trust, 
and respecteth not the proud, nor such as turn aside to 
lies. 

Jesus had found this blessedness in his experience, and therefore 
most fitly commended such trust to all who may be under trials 
and afflictions, in any measure similar. Let his people make 
their Lord alone their trust, and never look (in this sense of 
trusting) to the proud. The word "respecteth," meaning primarily 
to turn toward one, implies looking to one for help in need. 

5. Many, O Lokd my God, are thy wonderful works 
ivhich thou hast done, and thy thoughts which are to us- ward : 
they can not be reckoned up in order unto thee : if I would 
declare and speak of them, they are more than can be 
numbered. 

God's works of mercy and thoughts of love toward us, so many 
and so precious, impress the speaker's mind deeply. The clause, 
" They can not be reckoned up in order unto thee," is in the orig- 
inal a model of conciseness; somewhat thus : " There is no arrang- 
ing them to thee;" it is impossible to classify them and set them 

forth in full and orderly detail. Another sense has been put 

upon these words, thus: There is nothing that compares with 
them. But the former is preferable, especially because it allows 
us to continue the same line of thought through the verse. "Let 
me set them forth [I said to myself] and speak of them in order; 

they are too many to be numbered." Impressed by this view 

of the greatness and the number of God's blessings upon him, he 
is drawn in grateful love to ask: What can I do for God? This 
leads the mind to the w T ords that follow. 

6. Sacrifice and offering thou didst not desire; mine ears 
hast thou opened : burnt offering and sin offering hast thou 
not required. 

7. Then said I, Lo, I come : in the volume of the book 
it is written of me, 

8. I delight to do thy will, O my God: yea, thy law is 
within my heart. 

The thought lying upon the face of this passage is that a sense 



PSALM XL. 



173 



of God's great mercies constrains the speaker to a grateful obedi- 
ence and a full consecration of himself to the doing of God's will. 
Enumerating the various forms of sacrificial offering prescribed in 
the Mosaic ritual, he says, These, O Lord, thou dost not require 
of me. I am ready for any service which may be indicated by 
thy expressed will. I love obedience to that will above my chief 
joy. Thy law is within my heart, most dearly loved — to be obeyed 

with supreme delight. Giving attention next to points that may 

be said to lie deeper than the surface we may note that the con- 
nection of this verse with v. 5, applying all to the Messiah, may 
be this: An impressive sense of that great love with which "God 
so loved the world as to give up for it his only begotten Son," in- 
spired the Son to say in a like spirit of self-sacrificing benevol- 
ence — "I come into a world of sin, assume the nature of the race 
I am to save, and bow my soul to bear any burdens of suffering 
with obedience unto death that I may do the will of the Father in 
reference to the means and appliances for human salvation." So 
Jesus said during his life upon earth : "My meat is to do the will 
of him that sent me, and to finish his work" (John 4: 34). The 
writer to the Hebrews suggests that "though he were a Son, yet 
learned he obedience by the things which he suffered" — i. e., he 
received a discipline unto obedience by his experience of suffer- 
ing. Emphatic and important are the words: "Lo, I come; in 

the volume of the book it is written of me," The Messiah was 
long known under the name "the coming One, 7 ' "he that should 
come" — phrases which have their germ in this and kindred 
prophecies. "In the volume of the book," i. c, in the Pentateuch 
[no other book then extant bore this title] it was written: " The 
scepter shall not pass from Judah until Shiloh come " (Gen. 49 : 10). 
So here it is written concerning me, i. e., that 1 am to come, and 
devote myself to doing the perfect will of God, even though at the 

cost of untold sufferings.— " Mine ears hast thou opened." The 

Hebrew means primarily, thou hast digged,* but in the only sense 
applicable to the ear, digged open, that he might hear more per- 
fectly every indication of the divine will. Closely analogous is 
Isaiah 50: 4: "He wakeneth mine ear morning by morning to 
hear as pupils do." Some have found here a reference to the 
Mosaic regulation that in case a Hebrew servant preferred to be 
bound to his master for life instead of becoming free after six 
years, his ear must be bored with an awl. The other explanation is 
more probable, especially because Isaiah has it in an analogous form, 

perhaps borrowing the idea from this passage. A remarkable 

fact concerning this phrase must now be noticed. The Septuagint 
translation gives it: "A body thou hast prepared for me." Much 
critical labor has been expended on this extraordinary translation, 
but no proof has been found that they had a different Hebrew 
text from ours. It has never been made even plausible that they 
thought the words they have given are exact equivalents of the 



mi 



174 



PSALM XL. 



Hebrew words in their primary, literal sense. The only satisfactory 
construction is that they thought the sense of the Hebrew words 
obscure and therefore gave their view of the ultimate meaning by 
a very liberal paraphrase instead of a literal translation. They 
supposed the passage to mean this: The sacrifices of the Mosaic 
ritual thou dost not require of me; but thou dost require me to 
become a Lamb for sacrifice, and therefore dost provide me a body 
which may in due time be slain in sacrifice for the sins of the 

world. This Septuagint version of the passage the writer to the 

Hebrews quotes in full (10 : 5-10) virtually explaining the "com- 
ing" here spoken of to be Christ's coming into the world by his 
incarnation in human flesh, making the broadest possible dis- 
crimination between the Mosaic sacrifices on the one hand, and 
the offering of his own body once for all on the other, declaring 
that "he taketh away the first that he may establish the second;" 
and moreover giving great prominence to the point made very 
prominent by David, viz. : that all this was the will of God — the 
whole scheme of salvation having its birth in his eternal purpose 
and infinite love, and Jesus suffering all in loving obedience to 

that will. Let it be noted here that this remarkable version 

of the Septuagint is really a traditional interpretation of the pas- 
sage. It shows us how it was understood by the learned Jews of 
that age when this version was made, say two or three centuries 
before Christ. They saw in this passage the promised Messiah, 

and what is yet more, a Messiah becoming incarnate. Again, 

let it be noted that this passage is altogether inapplicable to David, 
especially when taken as it must be in antithesis with not offering 
the Mosaic sacrifices. The age of David was entirely too early for 
him to speak with reference to himself of not offering the Mosaic 
sacrifices, but coming in this emphatic sense as a substitute for 
those offerings. Moreover David was never called of God to offer 
his body a human sacrifice. Heuce we can give these words no 
satisfactory explanation save by referring them to Jesus Christ. 

9. I have preached righteousness in the great congrega- 
tion : lo, I have not refrained my lips, O Lord, thou 
knowest. 

10. I have not hid thy righteousness within ray heart ; I 
have declared thy faithfulness and thy salvation : I have 
not concealed thy loving-kindness and thy truth from the 
great congregation. 

"Preached righteousness," the Hebrew word being the most 
perfect equivalent which the language affords for evangelizing, i. e., 
preaching the glad tidings of gospel salvation. It is used repeat- 
edly in this sense by Isaiah (40 : 9, and 52 : 7). The expres- 
sions, "In the great congregation;" "not concealed from the great 
congregation," take their form from the times of David when the 
great congregation of all Israel convened at the one place for wor- 
ship ; but in sense it purports that Christ proclaimed this gospel 



PSALM XL. 



175 



to the Israel of his time and through them to the wide world. 
Having made propitiation for sin by his death, he proclaimed for 
all the race free pardon and God's righteousness in forgiving sin. 
These verses make this idea very emphatic. 

11. Withhold not thou thy tender mercies from me, O 
Lord : let thy loving-kindness and thy truth continually 
preserve me. 

Following the original we must make this not a prayer but an 
expression of confidence : " Thou wilt not withhold thy tender 
mercies from me," etc. The ground of this confidence lies in his 
own devotion to the will of God as expressed in the verses immedi- 
ately preceding. The definite correspondence of thought between 
those verses and this is somewhat obscured by the translators of 
our version who should have preserved the same verb in both pas- 
sages ; thus : " I have not withheld my lips, O Lord, thou knowest" 
(v. 9) : 14 therefore thou wilt not withhold thy tender mercies from 
me" (v. 11). The Hebrew has the same verb in both passages. 

12. For innumerable evils have compassed me about: 
mine iniquities have taken hold upon me, so that I am not able 
to look up ; they are more than the hairs of mine head : 
therefore my heart faileth me. 

The main difficulty felt in applying this Psalm to the Messiah 
lies in the words, "mine iniquities." How, it is asked, can this 
possibly be said by Jesus or on his behalf, since he was " with- 
out sin?" To this I answer: (1) It is conceded by the best 

lexicographers and critics that this Hebrew word * may mean not 
precisely sin, but the punishment of sin ; the sufferings which sin 
occasions, (2) The parallelism with " innumerable evils " de- 
mands this sense in the present case. -(3) The verb that fol- 
lows, "have taken hold upon me," forbids the sense of personal 
sins. It is not sin, but only the suffering or evil connected in 
some way with sin which can be said to take hold upon one. This 
Hebrew verb translated, "have taken hold upon," f should be 
carefully examined. Important cases of its use appear in Deut. 
28 : 2, 15, 45. " All these blessings shall come on thee and 
overtake thee." All these curses shall come upon thee and over- 
take thee;" 4 'all these curses shall pursue thee and overtake thee." 
The sense therefore is that of something befalling one from with- 
out and usually an infliction of evil. So in Ps. 69 : 24. " Let the 
burning heat of thy wrath fall upon them;" in our version, "take 
hold of them." Also Zech. 1 : 6. " Did not my words " [of 

threatening] "take hold of your fathers ? " This established 

usage of the verb suffices to show that the phrase in question can 
by no means speak of personal sins, but only of the infliction of evil 
in some way, for some reason. (4) We can now properly ad- 
vance another step and compare this language with that which 



17G 



PSALM XL. 



appears both in Old Testament prophecy and in Xew Testa- 
ment history with reference to the evils (in the sense of sufferings) 
brought upon the Messiah. The passages are well known and 
they are legion: e. g., "A man of sorrows;" "hath borne our 
griefs;" "wounded for our transgressions;" "the chastisement of 
our peace was upon him;" "the Lord hath laid upon him the 
iniquities of us all;" "for the transgression of my people was he 
stricken;" "he bare the sin of many;" (Isaiah 53 throughout). 
So the Xew Testament : "He hath made him to be sin for us who 
knew no sin" (2 Cor. 5: 21); "Christ hath redeemed us from the 
curse of the law, being made a curse for us" (Gal. 3: 13); "Who 
did no sin, but his own self bore our sins in his own body on 
the tree;" . . . "by whose stripes we were healed" (1 Pet 
2: 22, 24). Comparing these various passages with the one be- 
fore us it will be readily seen (a) that both speak of immense 
suffering coming upon the Messiah for sin; (b) that there is a 
striking similarity in the mode in which these sufferings came upon 
him. "Have taken hold upon me;" "have overtaken me" (the 
true sense of the word here), are only expanded and changed in 
form, not in sense, in the phrases — "The Lord hath laid upon 
him ;" " it pleased the Lord to bruise him ;" " God hath made him to 

be sin" (a sin-offering) for us, etc. A careful comparison of the 

phraseology used by prophets and apostles on this mysterious point 
of the sufferings of Christ may well relieve our minds of all surprise 
that the Messiah should say here in briefest terms — "Innumerable 
evils have compassed me about;" "mine iniquities" [those I am 
made to bear] "have taken hold upon me" with a grasp I can 

not loosen, as a burden I can not shake off. "So that I am not 

able to look up," should rather be, "so that I can not see; 1 all is 
dark as death about me. The darkness over all the land from 
the sixth hour to the ninth (Luke 23 : 44) was only a symbol of 
that "horror of great darkness" which fell upon the spirit of the 

world's Great Sufferer in those hours of his mysterious woe. 

"Therefore my heart faileth me" fills out this pictui-e of untold 
sorrow. It seemed too much to be endured. Did that fearful dark- 
ness shut off hope ? Did it hide from the Great Sufferer the face 
of his Father? We may recall his words on the very eve of these 
agonies: "This is your hour and the power of darkness (Luke 
22: 53), i. e., the hour for you and for the powers of darkness to 
do your worst against the suffering Son of man. Beyond this, 
what can w r e yet know? 

13. Be pleased, O Lord, to deliver me : 0 Loed, make 
haste to help me. 

What could such a sufferer do but pray ? This prophetic fore- 
showing is entirely at one with the history as we see in Gethse- 
mane; °on the cross ; and in the expressive words of the writer to 
the Hebrews, " Strong crying and tears unto him who was able to 
save !" 



PSALM XL. 



177 



14. Let them be ashamed and confounded together that 
seek after my soul to destroy it ; let them be driven back- 
ward and put to shame that wish me evil. 

15. Let them be desolate for a reward of their shame 
that say unto me, Aha, aha. 

The Hebrew verbs in these two verses are simple futures with 
nothing in the verses themselves to indicate prayer or imprecation. 
It is only their connection Avith v. 13 that favors the construction 

given in our English version. "Wish me evil" is less strong 

than the Hebrew which means, take delight in my calamity, the 
word being the same as in v 8 : "I delight to do thy will." " Evil" 
here is the same as the "evils innumerable" of v. 12. 

The question will arise, Is the spirit of these verses at one with 
the Savior's prayer on the cross : " Father, forgive them, for they 

know not what they do ?" 1 answer, (a) Taking these words 

as they stand in the original, i. e., as prediction only, they are per- 
fectly in harmony with the Savior's own words of prediction : 
"Behold, your house is left unto you desolate!" (Luke 13: 35), 

and also with the facts of the case. (b) While it is the mission 

of Jesus to offer pardon to the penitent and to pray that sinners, 
even his murderers, may repent and receive it, it is equally his 
mission to bring retribution both in time and eternity upon those 
whom no mercy can melt to penitence, and who bend their energies 

to frustrate all his endeavors to save the lost. (c) In these verses 

his enemies are seen and thought of only as madly bent on 
heightening his torture and thwarting his designs of mercy. So 
considered, what more or other could the Messiah do than breast 
their endeavors with his utmost strength, and carry through the 

scheme of human salvation despite of their mad opposition ? 

It ought not to be forgotten that Jesus saw in the malign spirit and 
efforts of his betrayers and murderers the very hand and heart of 
Satan. Shall it trouble us that he resists Satan at every point and 
gives him no quarter ? That were a miserably misplaced sympathy. 
Let us rather rejoice that this conflict is to the bitter end — to the 
very death — and Satan the one to fall ! 

16. Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in 
thee : let such as love thy salvation say continually, The 
Lord be magnified. 

17. But I am poor and needy ; yet the Lord thinketh 
upon me : thou art my help and my deliverer ; make no 
tarrying, O my God. 

The original of v. 1 6 is also future and not imperative ; prediction, 
and not prayer. Such results are forever sure, and no less glorious 

than sure ! These last five verses reappear nearly verbatim in 

Ps. 70. I see no occasion to assign any other special reason for 
this than that they are precious words and by no means inappro- 
priate to be sung apart from the connection in which they stand in 



178 



PSALM XLI. 



Ps. 40. Or may it be supposed that they had become so familiar 
as the closing verses of this Psalm that they suggested their rela- 
tion to the foregoing verses here, even though sung and read in 
that disconnected form as we find them in Ps. 70 ? 

PSALM XLI. 

This Psalm is the language of one suffering from sickness. He is 
conscious of having himself befriended the sick and helpless, and 
therefore is confident that God will deal tenderly with him. He 
has malign enemies who have been his professed friends but who 
now exult in the hope of his death and plot mischief and lies 
against him. Such hostility drives him to his great Friend above 

for help and consolation. This Psalm has many points in common 

with Ps. 38 and 39. It is therefore highly probable that it was an 
outgrowth of the same historic circumstances and bears the same 
date, i. e., near the close of David's life, under the trials that befell 
him from the conspiracy of Adonijah (1 Kings 1). It will at least 
give a certain life-likeness to the picture to assume that those were 

the circumstances under which the Psalm was written. The 

fact that these four Psalms (38-41) close the first of the five books 
of Psalms favors somewhat this view of their date. If they were 
the latest written — -the last effusions of his poetic inspiration — this 
is their appropriate place in this first collection of the Psalms of 
David. 

1. Blessed is lie that considereth the poor : the Lord will 
deliver him in time of trouble. 

The Hebrew word for " poor" may sometimes mean the money, 
less, but more naturally the weak, the dependent, and not im- 
probably here, the sick or the frail in health. " Considereth" 

is somewhat more than thinlceth upon. The primary sense is to 
look attentively toward, but here with the farther idea of looking 
kindly, with due sympathy and with prompt relief. Such an one 
the Lord delivers in the day of his trouble. Loving the spirit that 
sympathizes with the suffering, he will miss no fit opportunity to 
express his love by rewarding it openly. 

2. The Lord will preserve him, and keep him alive; and 
he shall be blessed upon the earth : and thou wilt not de- 
liver him unto the will of his enemies. 

3. The Lord will strengthen him upon the bed of lan- 
guishing : thou wilt make all his bed in his sickness. 

" Keep him alive," cause him to live in the sense of restoring 
him when he is sick. He shall be blessed" — prospered in the 
land [better than " earth"] i. e., in the Lord's promised land of 
Canaan. " Thou wilt not deliver," etc., is in the original rather 



PSALM XLL 



179 



a prayer than an assurance. " Do not thou deliver him up to the 
soul [Hebrew] of his enemies" — in the sense of their wicked de- 
sire. The sudden change of construction from the future to the 
imperative, from prediction to prayer, indicates the deep feeling 
and strong sympathy of the writer. He can not endure that God 
should fail of helping such a good man and therefore gives utter- 
ance here to this prayer. "Make all his bed in his sickness" 

means in the original much more than making up a sick man's 
bed by airing, stirring, and making it comfortable. It means to 
change his sick bed to a bed of healthful repose, implying the 
change of his state from sickness to health. The Hebrew word, 
having the sense to turn or change, looks for its object beyond his 
bed to his bodily state. 

4. I said, Lord, be merciful unto me: heal my soul; 
for I have sinned against thee. 

In the first words, "I said," the original makes the pronoun 7, 
very prominent, not to say emphatic. For my part, as respects 
myself, I lift up this one prayer of my heart: " Be merciful unto 
me and take my sins away." The striking point of the verse is 
that he regards his bodily sickness as occasioned by his sin. The 
reader will notice the same sentiment in Ps. 38: 3-5, 17, 18, and 
39: 8, 10, 11, which may be supposed to refer to the same points 
in his history. 

5. Mine enemies speak evil of me, When shall he die, 
and his name perish? 

The first verb is future ; mine enemies do and will speak evil of 
me ; I know them too well to expect any thing else. Adonijah 
and his sympathizing associates were waiting for the death of the 
aged king with aspirations so selfish as to be really malign. They 
longed to see his name go down so low as to interpose no barrier 
to their schemes. 

6. And if he come to see me, he speaketh vanity : his 
heart gathereth iniquity to itself; when he goeth abroad, 
he telleth it. 

7. All that hate me whisper together against me : against 
me do they devise my hurt. 

8. An evil disease, say they, cleaveth fast unto him : and 
now, that he lieth he shall rise up no more. 

"If he come to see" — not necessarily to see me, for the original 
does not say this, but if he comes to look about from a nearer 
point of view — to explore and see how the case stands, then he 
will speak untruthfully, artfully concealing his real designs. The 
Hebrew accents favor this reading of the next clause : As to his 

heart, he will gather scandal and lies into it. In the first clause 

of v. 8, the " evil disease" is probably a moral evil — some sin that 



180 



PSALM XLL 



in the view of bis enemies brought down God's judgments upon 
him. Hence their assurance that he could not rise from his bed 
again. This was indeed, one of the bitterest ingredients in his 
cup. 

9. Yea, mine own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, 
which did eat of my bread, hath lifted up Ids heel against 
me. 

Another most bitter thing was the treachery of former friends. 
They had violated the most sacred rights of hospitality and friend- 
ship; perhaps he means the dearest ties of relationship, for 
Adonijah was a son, from his father's own table; Joab also and 
Abiathar had been in most intimate relations to the royal person 

and table. To " lift up the heel" is a proverb, meaning they 

have turned away from me, throwing up the heel as they went. 
These words were said by Jesus (John 13: 18) to be fulfilled in the 
treachery of Judas. This fulfilling is in the sense of filling out the 
full sense of these words — a case which is tantamount to the full idea 
here. In the same way, when the Lord by a warning dream 
called Joseph with Mary and the child Jesus out of Egypt, the 
fact filled out again the sense of those words of ITosea, "Out of 
Egypt have I called my son." (Matt. 2 : 15, and Hos. 11:1). It 
is not necessary to interpret these words as directly prophetic of 
the treachery of Judas. As originally written they may have 
referred only to the treachery of Adonijah and his associates. 

10. But thou, O Loed, be merciful unto me, and raise 
me up, that I may requite them. 

"liaise me up," although they have said, "he shall never rise" 
(v. 8). Do thou this very thing which they vainly think can 

never be. "Requite them;" but this does not demand the 

sense of retaliation, much less of selfish, revengeful retaliation, for 
it may mean, that I may repay them good for their evil. Indeed 
the Hebrew word strongly favors this sense — to make good again, 
to make all whole, sound. David has repeatedly expressed this 
sentiment in his Psalms (35 : 12-14, and 7:4); and yet better, has 
lived it forth in his actual deeds (1 Sam. 24: 9-15, and 26: 18-25). 
There is no occasion therefore, to give these words the bad scn?c 
of a malign, wicked retaliation. 

11. By this I know that thou favourest me, because 
mine enemy doth not triumph over me. 

12. And as for me, thou upholdest me in mine, integrity, 
and settest me before thy face forever. 

"Because mine enemy will not triumph over me," i. e., will not 
have any occasion to triumph over me. The verb is future, ex- 
pressing his confidence in God that they will not succeed in their 
wicked plots so as to exult over his fall. "Upholdest me because 



PSALM XLII. 



181 



of my integrity rather than in it; u e., because my conduct toward 

them and toward thee has been in the main morally right. 

"Thou settest me before thy face; " under thine eye, where thou 
wilt carefully watch over me and guard me safely forever. 

13. Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting, 
and to everlasting. Amen, and amen. 

This doxology closes the first of the five books of the Psalms. 
A similar doxology occurs at the end of the second, third, and 
fourth books (Ps. 72 : 19, and 89 : 52, and 106 48). In the case 
of the last book, the last three Psalms are essentially one prolonged 
doxology. 

PSALM XLII. 

This Psalm opens the second book. It is a "Maschil," a Psalm 

for instruction. Our English version reads, "/or the sons of 

Korah," assuming that it was committed by the author into their 
hands to be sung in the sanctuary. The sons of Korah are well 
knoAvn to have been among the leading musicians in the temple 
service, their names being associated with those of Heman and 
Asaph. (See 1 Chron. 6 : 22, 31, 37, and 25 : 1-7, and 2 Chron. 20 : 
19). Eleven Psalms bear their name in the caption as here, viz., 
42, 44-49, 84, 85, 87, 88. But whether in these Psalms and in this 
one especially, they are authors or only singers has been earnest- 
ly debated, yet with no absolutely certain result. It is for the 
most part admitted that this Psalm gives the experience of David 
when driven from the holy city before Absalom his son. This is 
, the point of prime importance to the interpretation and illustra- 
tion of the Psalm. The question whether David himself wrote 
it or some one of the sons of Korah, is quite a secondary matter, 
provided we may assume that in the latter case it Avas written to 

represent David's experiences in his flight before Absalom. On 

the question of authorship, these considerations favor the sons of 
Korah: (1) The Hebrew preposition is constantly used elsewhere 
to indicate the author, the prefix (1), meaning to in the sense as- 
cribed to, but translated "of," a Psalm of David; "a Psalm of 

the sons of Korah." (2) In the eleven Psalms which have this 

caption, there is nothing which positively indicates David to be the 

author. The sons of Korah may have written them all. (3) 

They seem to have been authors since Solomon is compared with 

them (1 Kings 4: 31). (4) These eleven Psalms use Elohim 

much more than Jehovah for the name of God. David currently 

uses Jehovah much more than Elohim. (5) The style is thought 

to be more bold than in the Psalms known to be David's. Com- 
paring Ps. 42 with Ps. 3 on the same subject, we shall see force 

in this comparison. -In favor of the authorship of David are 

these two main considerations: (1) It is far more natural and 
probable that David should write his own personal experiences 



182 



PSALM XLII. 



than that others should do it. He was accustomed to -write his 
own. (2) It is very unnatural that the Psalro. should be as- 
cribed to many authors rather than to one. Authorship is legiti- 
mately the product of some one mind. Never so many sons of 
Korah might sing it, and might have the charge of it for the ser- 
vice of song. These points may suffice to show how nicely the 

considerations on either side balance each other. Every point 

in this Psalm is pertinent to the case of David seeking safety by 
flight from Jerusalem before the formidable conspiracy of Absa- 
lom. The history of these scenes stands in 2 Sam. 15-19. The 
longing for the worship of the sanctuary ; the yet deeper longing 
for the manifestation of God's presence and favor; and definitely, 
the localities mentioned (v. 6); "the land of Jordan and of the 
Hermonites," etc., concur to assign the Psalm to those events in 
David's personal history. 

1. As the hart panteth after the water brooks, so pant- 
eth my soul after thee, O God. 

2. My soul thirsteth for God, for the living God : when 
shall I come and appear before God ? 

The " hart " (the male deer), hot and faint in the chase or on 
the mountains of Judah, thirsts intensely for " the water-brooks." 
So David's soul thirsts and longs for God's manifested presence 
and love. V. 2 beautifully reiterates the thought : " for God, the 
living God," not the vain, unreal, dead gods of the idolaters ; but 
one forever living and for evermore the refuge and the joy of 
those who know and trust him. When shall I ever come again 
to appear in his lovely courts, a joyous worshiper ? To be ex- 
iled from his throne and from the city he had conquered and 
built himself for his royal home might naturally have cost him 
some pangs of grief; but he does not even name this in compar- 
ison with exile from the house of God and the place where his 
honor dwelt. And yet we must suppose that his heart is far more 
upon God himself than upon the place of his usual manifestation. 

This uprising of Absalom was to David at once national and 

domestic ; it struck with the same blow both his throne and his 
home. He saw in it a judgment from God, not so much upon his 
nation as upon himself, and upon himself rather for his sins in the 
matter of Uriah than for any maladministration as king. God 
was fearfully calling to remembrance the sad scenes of his family 
history. David doubtless felt that he deserved this exile from the 
city and sanctuary of his God ; but O, did he not long to be for- 
given of God and to be restored once more as a pardoned child! 

3. My tears have been my meat day and night, while 
they continually say unto me, Where is thy God ? 

" Meat," not flesh but food — a most expressive figure, evincing 
the deepest grief through the livelong day and night. It heightened 
this grief that his enemies tauntingly said, Where is thy God now ? 



PSALM XLII. 



183 



Essentially the same sentiment though rhetorically less bold appears 
in Ps. 3 : 2 : " Many there be who say of my soul, There is no 
help for him in God." Perhaps he thinks of those curses from 
Shimei who charged that God was visiting upon him the blood of 
the house of Saul (2 Sam. 16 : 7, 8). It is in human nature to 
bear such maledictions and reproaches tolerably when one's own 
conscience is quiet. But when under God's chastening hand they 
become perpetually suggestive of bitter sins for which we can 
make no apology, then comes the agony of the smitten soul ! 

4. When I remember these things, I pour out my soul in 
me : for I had gone with the multitude, I went with them 
to the house of God, with the voice of joy and praise, with 
a multitude that kept holyday. 

" I pour out my soul in me" — words of intense emotion and most 
poignant grief. The memory of those sacred festal scenes when in 
solemn procession the vast concourse of people moved up the hill 
of Zion to the sacred tabernacle, the hallowed presence chamber of 
the Most High, is in painful contrast with this exile and its deso- 
late surroundings ; yet this is sad mainly because so suggestive of the 
lost presence of God. For all Christian experience witnesses that 
even such an exile as this from home and throne, on those mountains 
of Hermon, never so far away from the hill of Zion, would have 
been trivial if God had been there in his joyous presence with its 

impressive manifestations. This construction of the verse, in 

harmony with our English version, assumes that David in his exile 
beyond the Jordan is recalling the blest days of festal worship in 
Jerusalem, and that this recollection at first thought embitters his 
grief, but at second thought suggests that his God is ever faithful 
and may be trusted even in these darkest hours, and will yet 

bring him back to the city and sanctuary of his early love. A 

different construction, urged strongly by Alexander as the only 
one which "gives the future forms [of the verbs] their proper 
force instead of converting them into past tenses," translates thus : 
"These things I will remember and will pour out upon me my 
soul when I pass in the crowd, when I march with them up to the 
house of God," etc. That is, the whole verse is anticipative. He 
is thinking how he shall review these scenes of his exile when he 
shall once get back to the holy city and head its solemn proces- 
sions to the sanctuary ; thus : These things let me recall to mind 
and let me pour out my soul when I shall be moving on with the 
worshiping multitude to the house of God, etc. This construction 
is no doubt favored by the Hebrew tenses ; but on the other hand 
it seems in point of sentiment unnatural and artificial. The first 
named construction supposes that during this exile David recalls 
the scenes of his past worship at Jerusalem; the second, that he 
is forecasting future scenes of worship there and thinking how 
pleasant it will be then to pour out his soul, i. e., in thanksgiving for 
his deliverance. The great objection to the latter is that at this 



184 



PSALM XLII. 



stage of the Psalm he has not reached that point yet. It supposes 
him to be where he is not. In fact his soul is still cast down — is 
just at this point struggling up to catch the first ray of light and 
hope. 

5. Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art 
thou disquieted in me ? hope thou in God : for I shall yet 
praise him for the help of his countenance. 

The verb, " cast down," has the sense of being bowed low, almost 
if not altogether prostrated ; while the form of the verb favors the 
reflexive sense — a* self-produced effect: Why art thou breaking 
down thine own hopes and courage? Why indulge such self-de- 
pressing thoughts ? The next words carry forward this view : 
Why such unrest ? such inward anxiety ? such lack of trust ? 
Hope thou in God! Poetically the hopeful spirit accosts the des- 
ponding one, as if there were two conflicting hearts in his inner 
being; one lying prone in the dust, borne down in discouragement; 
the other lifting its eye upward ; catching a glimpse of the faithful 
God ; calling upon his fellow to take courage and still hope in God. 

u For the help of his countenance ;" literally, for the salvatioyi 

of his face, i. <?., for the salvation which his manifested presence 
will bring. Truly there is salvation in his presence ! When his 
face shines upon us, we are already saved ! 

6. O my God, my soul is cast down within me : therefore 
will I remember thee from the land of Jordan, and of the 
Hermonites, from the hill Mizar. 

Still depressed, the Psalmist addresses God directly, beautifully 
and most fitly laying open his whole case : " 0 my God, my soul is 
fearfully borne down with grief, depression ; 0 let me remember 
thee from this far off land of the Jordan — from these mountains of 
Hermon. It avails me nothing to brood over my affliction, still 
turning my eye away from thee; let me rather turn toward thee, 

my God, and remember thee from this land of my exile. The 

mountains of Hermon were the north-east boundary of Palestine 
entire, appearing in the history (Deut. 3:8, 9, and 4: 48, and 
Josh. 12: 1.) The hill Mizar [the little] seems to have been a 
special locality in the Hermon range, marking perhaps more de- 
finitely the place of his rest at this time. 

7. Deep calleth unto deep at the noise of thy water-spouts : 
all thy waves and thy billows are gone over me. 

In the first clause it is not easy to determine the precise sense. 
Literally it stands, " Deep unto deep is calling to the voice of thy 
water-spouts ;" " deep" being the word used (Gen. 1 : 2) of the 
great mass of waters buried in darkness ; also for the ocean masses 
of the deluge (Gen. 7 : 4, and 8:2); while the word for "water- 
spouts" occurs elsewhere but once (2 Sam. 5: 8), there translated 
" gutter," but obviously used with reference to the sound of rushing 



PSALM XLIL 



185 



waters. Whether the figure before the writer's mind is that of the 
surging billows of the sea, answering to each other in their per- 
petual succession, or the rushing of storm-clouds and aerial water- 
spouts, it is not easy to decide. It is clear however that the 
roaring and dashing of waters is before the mind and suggested 
the thought in the last clause : " All thy waves and thy billows 
sweep over me." I am as one in the bottom of the sea, sunk be- 
neath the ever-dashing breakers. Wave after wave of trouble and 
turmoil break over me. 

8. Yet the Lord will command his loving-kindness in 
the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and 
my prayer unto the God of my life. 

"Will command," i. e., will commission his loving-kindness to 
manifest itself in my behalf. And I will praise him night and day, 
blending prayer with praise also continually to the God who is 
my life and on whom all the good of my life depends. This is 
the language of strong confidence and of overflowing gratitude. 

. 9. I will say unto God my rock, Why hast thou forgot- 
ten me? why go I mourning because of the oppression of 
the enemy? 

The meaning of this is plain, but in its moral attitude it seems 
to go to the outermost limit of propriety in calling upon God for 
the reasons of his course. Whoever should adopt these words 
into his own prayer must chasten his spirit to reverence and 
modest humility, remembering that God is great and pure, and 
never can do any thing amiss. 

10. As with a sword in my bones, mine enemies reproach 
me; while they say daily unto me, Where is thy God? 

The bitterest ingredient in David's cup of grief during these 
scenes was the thought that his God was chastening him, and had 
withdrawn his favor because of his sin. That sad fall in the mat- 
ter of Bathsheba and Uriah was perhaps still recent, and his ex- 
pulsion from his throne and from the holy city must have been 
bitterly suggestive, tearing open those half-healed wounds and 
causing him to live over again the contrition, the sorrows, and 
the despondencies which grew out of that group of sins. How 
truly the taunts of his foes — " Where is thy God now ? " — must have 
been like a sword smiting through his very bones ! 

11. W r hy art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art 
thou disquieted within me ? hope thou in God : for I shall 
yet praise him, ivho is the health of my countenance, and 
my God. 

Again his faith rebukes his unbelief — the hopeful element in 
his soul, the desponding and despairing one : Hope thou still in 
thy God! "The health of my countenance" repeats the lan- 



186 



PSALM XLIII. 



guage of v. 5 save that here -we have 11 my face" against " thy 

face" there. "Health" is precisely the salvations of my face, 

i. e., in thought my Savior, whose salvation will give me smiles for 
tears — the glow of joy in my countenance for these deep lines of 
woe. 

PSALM XLIII. 

Manifestly this Psalm is one of a pair with the preceding, and 
hence opens with no caption whatever. It might be considered a 
continuation. It will be seen that the strain of it is the same; 
the leading thoughts and phrases are here repeated. 

1. Judge me, O God, and plead my cause against an un- 
godly nation : O deliver me from the deceitful and unjust 
man. s 

David implores God to judge between him and the conspirators 
(Absalom and his associates) who had risen up to Avrest away his 
throne. He calls them a nation,'* the word for a heathen power 
in array against God's people, but fitly applied to the conspirators 
here, for they were acting the part of a heathen force in arms 

against the Lord's anointed. David speaks as one who felt that 

there was no help for him but in his God. This pending question 
as to the throne must be submitted to God's decision as the 
ultimate judge. 

2. For thou art the God of my strength : why dost thou 
cast me off? why go I mourning because of the oppression 
of the enemy ? 

" For all my strength is in thee." Forsaken of thee, my case 

is hopeless ; personally, I am without strength. Why hast thou 

left me to wander abroad, a sad mourner, by reason of these cruel 
oppressions of the enemy ? 

3. O send out thy light and thy truth : let them lead 
me ; let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy 
tabernacles. 

"Thy light" — to chase away this darkness and to guide me in 
thy perfect way. "Thy truth," in the sense here of manifesting 
thy faithfulness in the fulfillment of promise. So guided all will 

be well. The naming of Zion hill and the sacred tabernacle 

compels us to locate this Psalm during the time of David, and 
after the death of Saul, inasmuch as before this, there was no 
Zion hill, and after the very early years of Solomon, no taber- 
nacle but a temple. 



PSALM XLIV. 



187 



4. Then will I go unto the altar of" God, unto God my 
exceeding joy : yea, upon the harp will I praise thee, O 
God my God. 

If once led back by God's kind hand to his throne, how joyfully 
would he hasten to the altar of God with his thank-offerings, even 
to that God who was his exultant joy, his joy of exultation, as the 
Hebrew implies. This strong language witnesses to the depth 
and fullness of his joy in God. Plainly he had strong emotions of 
soul and did not shun their proper expression. 

5. Why art thou cast down, O my soul? and why art 
thou disquieted within me? hope in God: for I shall yet 
praise him, who is the health of my countenance, and my 
God. 

Let this pair of beautiful Psalms suggest the blessedness of hav- 
ing such a God, the Refuge of our soul in trouble, the exceeding 
joy of our heart in the day of our deliverance! It is no mean 
occasion of thanksgiving that God gave his servant David such ex- 
periences and then caused them to be sent down to us in this sa- 
cred record for our example and edification. Let none of us fail 
to have like trust in God in the days of our affliction and equal 
joy and gratitude for the salvations of his presence ! 

PSALM XLIV. 

This is one of those eleven Psalms over which in our English 
version we read, "For the sons of Korah," which were composed 
either by the sons of Korah or by David for their use. The gen- 
eral strain of this Psalm is clear, but the particular historic oc- 
casion is not certain. It is thought by some critics (e. g n Heng- 
stenberg, Keil, Delitzsch, Wordsworth) to refer to the same his- 
toric circumstances as Ps. 60, i. <?., to the severe conflicts connected 
with the conquest of Moab, Zobah, Syria, Ammon, and Edom, of 
which the history may be seen in 2 Sam. 8, and 1 Chron. 18. 
Obviously this Psalm has many points of resemblance with Ps. 60. 
But it seems to me to indicate more severe reverses, and a more 
depressed state of the Hebrew people than the history discloses 
at any time during the reign of David. It may therefore belong 
to the times of the later kings. Some have located it shortly be- 
fore the captivity. It lacks the data for determining its historic 

time with certainty. Of course if we locate it after David's 

time we assign it to some one of the sons of Korah as its au- 
thor. 

1. "We have heard with onr ears, O God, our fathers 
have told us, what work thou didst in their days, in the 
times of old. 



188 



PSALM XL1V. 



2. Sow thou didst drive out the heathen with thy hand, 
and plantedst them ; how thou didst afflict the people, and 
cast them out. 

3. For they got not the land in possession by their own 
sword, neither did their own arm save them : but thy right 
hand, and thine arm, and the light of thy countenance, be- 
cause thou hadst a favor unto them. 

It has come down to us by tradition from the fathers how thou, 
Lord, didst subdue the nations of Canaan by Joshua, drive them 
out, and plant thy people in their deserted cities and lands. It 
was not the sword of Israel nor their right arm that achieved 
these victories, but thine. In the time of this Psalm it was a joy 
to recall these wonderful works of the God of their fathers. 

4. Thou art my King, O God: command deliverances 
for Jacob. 

The Hebrew is emphatic: "Thou art He" [still] "my King," 
no less than theirs, 0 thou mighty God ! Let thy decree go forth 
[again] for the salvation of Jacob. 

5. Through thee will we push down our enemies : 
through thy name will we tread them under that rise up 
against us. 

6. For I will not trust in my bow, neither shall my 

sword save me. 

"Push down," as horned cattle with head and horns. As our 
fathers conquered with thy strength, not their own, so I will not 
trust in my bow, nor shall my own sword be my salvation. 

7. But thou hast saved us from our enemies, and hast 
put them to shame that hated us. 

8. In God we boast all the day long, and praise thy name 
forever. Selah. 

"All the day," not merely through all the hours of some one 
day, but continually — its parallel in the next clause being "for- 
ever." "Selah" suggests a pause to dwell impressively upon 

this joyful and most wholesome thought. 

9. But thou hast cast off, and put us to shame ; and go- 
est not forth with our armies. 

10. Thou makest us to turn back from the enemy: and 
they which hate us spoil for themselves. 

Here is a sudden change in the tone of the song, indicating re- 
verses, defeats; God's people forsaken of him, fleeing before their 
enemies and made a spoil. It does not appear how long this 
state of things continued or how severe these disasters were. 



PSALM XLIV. 



189 



But the language in these and the following verses through v. 10 
is certainly quite strong. 

11. Thou hast given us like sheep appointed for meat; 
and hast scattered us among the heathen. 

12. Thou sellest thy people for nought, and dost not in- 
crease thy wealth by their price. 

Thou hast suffered us to be devoured by our enemies as sheep 
slaughtered for the table. "Scattered us among the heathen" 
certainly seems to imply that some, not to say many, of the peo- 
ple had been taken captive in war. This may have been less than 
a captivity of the entire nation like that by the Chaldeans. 
" Sold " into the hand of their enemies indicated the defeat and 
subjection of Israel, as may be seen often in the history of the 
Judges (2 : 14, and 3 : 8, and 4 : 2, etc.) See the same language Isa. 
52 : 3. The figure assumes that they were his property, his in- 
heritance ; to be alienated into the possession of other lords there- 
fore only by sale. The Psalmist expostulates with God, argu- 
ing that his wealth was not increased by the avails of this sale, 
this trading away of his covenant people. It inured only to the 
dishonor of his name. 

13. Thou makest us a reproach to our neighbours, a 
scorn and a derision to them that are round about us. 

14. Thou makest us a byword among the heathen, a 
shaking of the head among the people. 

15. My confusion is continually before me, and the shame 
of my face hath covered me. 

16. For the voice of him that reproacheth and blas- 
phemeth ; by reason of the enemy and avenger. 

The Psalmist dwells long upon this thought: the reproach cast 
upon the well-known people of God by their victorious enemies. 
He seems to assume tacitly that this reproach must react against 
their God, as if it proved him too weak to deliver and to save. 

17. All this is come upon us; yet have we not forgotten 
thee, neither have we dealt falsely in thy covenant. 

18. Our heart is not turned back, neither have our steps 
declined from thy way ; 

19. Though thou hast sore broken us in the place of 
dragons, and covered us with the shadow of death. 

It is not supposable that the Psalmist meant to say that his 
people had been faultless before God, for this would imply that 
God had forsaken and chastened them without cause. He might 
however say that they had not apostatized in such a degree as to 
forfeit their relation to God as his people. Their heart still turned 
9 



190 



PSALM XLIV. 



toward their God, sought his face, and recognized his coTenant 
with them. On this ground he plead that God would not cast 

them off forever. "Sore broken us," crushed us down, is the 

sense of the verb. "In the place of dragons" — of course, a place 

fearfully desolate. The prophecies that predict the utter ruin of 
Babylon and of Edom describe them as the place for dragons and 
all most hideous and doleful creatures (Is. 13: 21, 22, and 34: 11- 

14, etc).' "Covered us with the shadow of death" — the deepest 

darkness, symbolic of extreme calamity. 

20. If we have forgotten the name of our God, or stretched 
out our hands to a strange god ; 

21. Shall not God search this out? for he knoweth the 
secrets of the heart. 

" Forgotten the name " — equivalent to forgetting God, for his 
name represents himself. To stretch out the hand to such a God 
is an act of worship, especially of prayer. See Ps. 28 : 2. Surely 
God. can not fail to take cognizance of such idolatry. No sin 
however secret can escape his eye. 

22. Yea, for thy sake are we killed all the day long; we 
are counted as sheep for the slaughter. 

The word translated " Yea " is common in the sense of /or, 
because, and logically connects this verse with those which precede 
v. 20, the thought being ; We are indeed thy people still for we 
are perpetually slaughtered for thy sake. The evils we suffer are 

persecutions brought on us because we are thy people. Paul 

(Rom. 8: 3&) quotes it in this sense of Christian persecution. 
He found here not exactly a prophecy of his own times but words 
which well expressed the thing he would say. 

23. Awake, why sleepest thou, O Lord ? arise, cast us 
not off forever. 

24. Wherefore hidest thou thy face, and forgettest our 
affliction and our oppression ? 

25. For our soul is bowed down to the dust: our belly 
cleaveth unto the earth. 

26. Arise for our help, and redeem us for thy mercies' 
sake. 

This earnest expostulation represents God's apparent inaction 
and forgetfulness as being asleep from which his people implore 
him to awake for their deliverance. They urge also the extremity 
of their sufferings and the honor of God's promised mercies. 
This plea and argument would eminently befit the people of God 
or even any individual Christian in any scene of great affliction 
and depression. 



PSALM XLV. 



191 



PSALM XLV. 

This Psalm deserves careful attention. The numerous points 
made in its caption indicate a high sense of its importance in the 

view of its compilers. " To the chief musician sets it apart 

for the service of the sanctuary and therefore precludes the idea 

of its being merely a nuptial song. " Upon Shoshannim" is 

variously explained — of the musical instrument with which it 
should be accompanied ; of the tune in which it should be sung ; 
as the first words of some well known song which would suggest 
the tune for this. Far more probable than either of these explana- 
tions is that which translates, " Concerning lilies" with reference 
to the figurative use of the same word in the Song of Solomon 
(Song 2 : 1, 2, 16, and 4 : 5, and 5 : 13, and 6 : 2, 3, and 7 : 2). 
See my Introduction to Notes on the Song, page 332. Lilies are 
a pertinent figure for women of beauty and purity — prominent 

personages in this Psalm. " For the sons of Koran," here as in 

Ps. 42—14 and 46-49, either to or for ; indicating either authorship 
or musical supervision. Inasmuch as this song stands in intimate 
relation to the Song of Solomon, and must have had Solomon him- 
self as the ground-work of its imagery, it was probably written 
later than David's time and by some one of the sons of Korah. 

"Maschil," a didactic or instructive Psalm; having therefore 

a moral purpose far higher than mere amusement at a marriage 

festival. " A song of the loved ones;" not merely a song about 

love, nor a loveablc song, but a song concerning the beloved 
Messiah and his beloved bride. This construction is sustained by 
the manifest scope of the Psalm ; by the unquestionable allusions 
in it to the Song of Solomon, and by the analogous and probably 
borrowed words of Isaiah (5 : 1)..* That this Psalm is purely, 

* The following paragraph from the Introduction to my Notes on the 

Song of Solomon (page 332, 333) is in place here. " This Psalm (45) 

seems to have been built upon the Song of Solomon. It certainly contains 
a number of similar forms of expression which have altogether the appear- 
ance of being definite allusions. Thus in the caption of the Psalm, 4 Upon 
Shoshannim/ i. e., concerning lilies — the symbol of beautiful women. 
Now this is the very word used repeatedly in this as well as in its primary 
sense in the Song (2 : 1, 2, 16, and 4 : 5, and 5 : 13, and 6 : 2, 3, and 7 : 2). 

Further the caption adds, ' A song of the loved ones,' which also is a 

precise description of the Song of Solomon. Again, the subject of the 
Psalm is declared to be ' touching the king ' (vs. 1, 5, 11, 13-15), to which 
point the Song of Solomon corresponds perfectly as may be seen in 1 : 4, 

12, and 7 : 5. This king (in the Psalm) receives the highest possible 

commendation for his beauty ; v. 2, ' Thou art fairer than the children of 
men' — which only reproduces the whole scope of the Song, e.g., 5: 10. 

' My beloved is white and ruddy, the chiefest among ten thousand.' A 

special point is made of 1 grace of lips ' — useful and attractive speech. 
The phrase in the Psalm is, 1 Grace is poured into thy lips ' (v. 2) : in the 
Song — ' His lips like lilies, dropping sweet-smelling myrrh : his mouth is 
most sweet, yea, he is altogether lovely ' (5 : 13, 16). Again, the reference 
(Ps. 45 : 7) to this king's companions [' fellows '] gives us in the Hebrew 



192 



PSALM XLV. 



thoroughly Messianic has been the doctrine of those who have held 
the word of God in hand and in honor throughout all the ages. 
The Chaldee Targum on v. 2 has this : " Thy beauty, O King 
Messiah, is greater than of the sons of men." With this the oldest 

Jewish Rabbis accord. The voice of the early Christian church 

may be given in the words of Theodoret : " This is a Psalm for 

the beloved, i. e. } for the beloved Son of God." The writer to 

the Hebrews gives his emphatic indorsement by quoting vs. 6, 7 
entire as the words of God to his Son (1 : 8, 9). " But unto the 
Son he saith, Thy throne, O God, is for ever and ever," etc. 
The superlative beauty of this King is in the grace of his lips : 
he is the oracle of God to man; " never man spake like this man." 
He came from heaven to earth to bring us words from God and 
therefore is significantly called, The Word. He rides forth in 
majesty, not because of personal beauty, or martial prowess, or mus- 
cular strength, or majestic mien, but " because of truth, meekness, 
and righteousness." It is because he loves righteousness and hates 
wickedness that his God anoints him, i. e., makes him his Anointed 
One, the true Messiah, far above all other anointed kings of the Theoc- 
racy. And finally, his children are to be princes in all the earth (v. 
16), and his name shall be remembered through all generations, him- 
self an object of praise from all the people forever and ever. Verily 
no personage less than Jesus the Messiah is here, King of kings and 
Lord of lords, " his kingdom an everlasting kingdom, and his 
dominion that which knows no end." Still the Messianic argu- 
ment is not exhausted, for new elements appear in the facts quite 
peculiar to this prophecy, e. g., that here the Messiah is a bride- 
groom ; his bride is a prominent personage ; she is counseled to 
forsake father and mother and cleave to the King her "Lord." A 
new family is constituted ; the fruits thereof are children to be 
"made princes in all the wide earth" — when "the kingdoms of 
this world become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ." 
The germ of this idea lies in the Song of Solomon, there more ex- 

the same word which occurs twice in the Song (1 : 7, and 8: 13). ' The 

flocks of thy companions ' the companions hearken to thy voice.' 

The bridal procession is prominent in both the Song (3 : 6-11) and the 
Psalm (vs. 14, 15). The Queen is adorned with surpassing splendor in the 
Psalm (v. 9): 'Upon thy right hand did stand the queen in gold of 
Ophir.' ' The King's daughter is all glorious within ' (v. 13). The entire 
strain of the Song is the same, e. g., 4: 9-11, with all which may be 
compared Rev. 19 : 7, 8 — ' His wife hath made herself ready ;' ' arrayed 

in fine linen, clean and white.' A very specific point is the mention in 

both of 'myrrh and aloes;' in the Psalm v. 8; in the Song, 4: 14 — a 
combination found nowhere else in the Bible. Resemblances so numer- 
ous, so apparently undesigned, and at once so general, covering the scope 
and drift of each composition, and yet so minute, reaching to the definite 
points of costume and drapery, seem to justify us fully in the conclusion 
that the Psalm is precisely the Song over again — the Song condensed, 
simplified, its religious significance and practical bearings brought out 
more distinctly, and the whole adapted to public worship in the sanctuary 
— set to music." 



PSALM XLV. 



193 



pandcd and diffuse than here ; enlarged to gather in more points 
of oriental beauty; here put in convenient form for the musical 
service of the sanctury.* It scarcely need be added that this alle- 
gorical conception which compared the covenant relation of God 
with Israel to human marriage and which made her Maker her 
husband and herself the bride, appears continually in the Old 
Testament Prophets subsequently to the date of these compositions 
(Song of Solomon and Ps. 45), and also throughout the New Testa- 
ment no less. (See Isa. 54: 5, and 62: 4, 5; Jer. 3:1; Ezek. 
16 and 23; Mat. 9: 15, and 22: 2, and 25: 1, and John 3: 29, 
and 2 Cor. 11 : 2, and Eph. 5: 25-32, and Rev. 19: 7, and 21: 2, 

and 22: 17.) Comprehensively then we may say, the argument 

for the Messianic reference of this Psalm lacks none of the usual 
points of evidence, while it has some in extraordinary fullness and 
force. It applies aptly to the Messiah in every particular ; it re- 
fuses to adapt itself to any other personage ; its reference to the 
Messiah is abundantly confirmed by the fact that the symbol of 
marriage to illustrate the relation of the Messiah to his people, 
starting with this Psalm and the Song of Solomon, runs through 
all the Scriptures subsequently written, developed strongly in the 
New Testament as having special reference to Christ and his 
church ; and finally it is quoted by an inspired Apostle (Heb. 1 : 
7, 8) in a way which peremptorily demands its original reference 
to the Messiah and to him only. 

1. My heart is inditing a good matter : I speak of the 
things which I have made touching the King : my tongue 
is the pen of a ready writer. 

" Is inditing," but in the original, with more beauty and force; 
" My heart boils up [and overflows] with a good thing." My emo- 
tions are stirred to their depths with ravishing thoughts of the 
glorious King and his beautiful bride. " I am to utter the song I 
have prepared concerning the King; my tongue is the pen of a 
swift writer," for my heart is so full of thoughts, rich and beauti- 
ful, I have only to open my lips and they pour forth fast as the 
most rapid pen can write them. A wonderful exordium truly, in- 
dicating the profound interest which filled and stirred the soul of 
this poet-prophet. 

• 2. Thou art fairer than the children of men: grace is 
poured into thy lips : therefore God hath blessed thee for- 
ever. 

Thou art exceeding fair above the sons of men — the verb being 
in a specially emphatic form. The point of superlative beauty is 
the lips considered as organs of speech, for the reference to 
"truth" (v. 6) and to moral qualities generally, and especially to 

* These points are discussed much more fully in my Introduction to 
Notes on the Song of Solomon. 



194 



PSALM XLV. 



the use of truth as a moral power for the subjugation of his enemies, 
shows this to be the thing intended here. This may remind us 
of the corresponding testimonies borne of Jesus during his earthly 
life : " The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of 
grace and truth" (John 1: 14); "They wondered at the gracious 
words which proceeded out of his mouth;" "Never man spake 

like this man." Therefore, because of his mission of heavenly 

truth from God to men; because he came to reveal God in words 
and forms so perfect and so precious ; " therefore God hath blessed 
thee forever." His work fully meets the approval of the Father; 
it perfectly ensures the Father's blessing to the end of its absolute 
success and final triumph over all the powers of darkness and 
sin. 

3. Gird thy sword upon thy thigh, O most Mighty, with 
thy glory and thy majesty. 

4. And in thy majesty ride prosperously, because of truth 
and meekness and righteousness ; and thy right hand shall 
teach thee terrible things. 

The martial genius of the age of David appears in this figure, 
the sword girded jpn the thigh ; and yet the glory of this King 
marching forth in triumph, lies not in routed armies and heaps of 
the slain ; not in cities laid desolate, wives made widows, and 
children fatherless; but in "truth, meekness, and righteousness." 
He comes to bring to men most blessed truth concerning their 
Great Father; to turn them from darkness, delusion, and crime, 

to light, truth, and love. "Thou Mighty One;" but Isaiah has 

it, "The Mighty God" (9: 6) — possibly borrowing from this very 

passage. "Glory" and "Majesty" are terms frequently and most 

legitimately used of the surpassing qualities of the Infinite God — 

not out of place therefore, when said of his equal Son. "Ride 

prosperously" is made in the Hebrew idiom with two imperative 

verbs: "prosper;" "ride." " Thy right hand shall guide thee" 

to wondrous achievements and results — this being the sense of the 
original verb. Sentiment : Thy glorious qualities shall insure 
thee magnificent success — such success as will make profound im- 
pressions of reverence and awe ["terrible things"], but not "ter- 
rible" in the sense of appalling, undesirable, but rather of being 
impressive, producing a deep sensation, commanding the admiring 
awe of the universe. 

5. Thine arrows are sharp in the heart of the King's 
enemies ; ivhereby the people fall under thee. 

The Hebrew words stand in this order: "Thine arrows are sharp; 
people under thee shall fall; in the heart of the enemies of the 
King;" the last clause being an after-thought appended, to which 
the word "sharp" should be prefixed — Yea, sharp are they "in 
the very heart of the King's enemies." The writer to the Hebrews 
(4: 12) perhaps borrows and then expands: "For the word of 



PSALM XLV. 



195 



God is sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the 
dividing asunder of soul and spirit." The power of truth sub- 
dues hearts most stubborn ; humbles hearts most proud. 

6. Thy throne, O God, is forever and ever : the scepter 
of thy kingdom is a right scepter. 

7. Thou lovest righteousness, and hatest wickedness : 
therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of 
gladness above thy fellows. 

Here note (1) that the Messiah is addressed as God. This is 
really the case in v. 7 as well as in v. 6. " Therefore, O God, 
hath thy God anointed thee," etc. This is repeated by Isaiah 
(9: 6): "His name shall be called the Mighty God, the Everlast- 
ing Father. (2) His throne is eternal; forever and ever. Other 

kingdoms, the mightiest and proudest ever reared by mortals, are 
transient; the face of the world is strown with their ruins; but 
this kingdom shall never collapse ; no chronicler in the ages never 
so distant shall have to speak of its fall; no explorer shall 

traverse and survey its ruins. (3) Beautifully it shall be thus 

enduring and imperishable because it is righteous : " the scepter of 
thy kingdom is a right seepter." " Thou lovest righteousness and 
hatest wickedness ; therefore, O God, hath thy God anointed thee 
with joy" more than any of thy associate kings on the throne of 
Israel from whom the Messiah is thought of as coming forth. 
Precisely this is the strain of argument in Isaiah 11: 1-9; "the 
spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him;" "he shall not judge after 
the sight of his eyes ;" " with righteousness shall he judge the poor;" 
"with the breath of his lips shall he slay the wicked;" therefore 
men "shall not hurt nor destroy in all this holy mountain," etc. 
The Infinite God is committed to the interests of righteousness, 
purity, love, and the highest blessedness of the beings he has 
created ; therefore the King who rules to the certain a'ccomplish- 
ment of these grand results shall reign with assured prosperity — 
a reign that never can end. Shall not the Great God be praised 
for this ? 

8. All thy garments smell of myrrh, and aloes, and cas- 
sia, out of the ivory palaces, whereby they have made thee 
glad. 

The anointing with oil as in the previous verse suggests per- 
fumery as here. " Myrrh, aloes, and cassia are all thy garments," 
L e., they are all perfumed with these sweet spices. These iden- 
tical spices are named in the Song of Solomon in this combination ; 

not elsewhere in scripture. All thy garments, or perhaps the 

implied wearers, come forth out of palaces ornamented with ivory, 
from which also they have gladdened thee, such ornamentation and 
perfumery being in place on such joyful occasions. 



196 



PSALM XLV. 



9. Kings' daughters were among thy honourable women: 
upon thy right hand did stand the queen in gold of Ophir. 

"Honorable women," maids of honor; the virgins whose pres- 
ence graced the marriage solemnities. The magnificence of this 
scene is heightened by the circumstance that these maids of honor 

are daughters of kings, themselves princesses of exalted rank. 

"Upon the right hand," the post of honor, stood the queen, the 
bride herself. " In gold of Ophir," not, as some have thought, 
clad in solid gold, but in garments ornamented with gold — the 
precise manner of ornamentation being to us a point of no ac- 
count. 

10. Hearken, O daughter, and consider, and incline 
thine ear; forget also thine own people, and thy father's 
house ; 

11. So shall the King greatly desire thy beauty : for he 
is thy Lord ; and worship thou him. 

The bride of the great King having now been introduced, the 
song turns suggestively from adornment and etiquette to moral 
counsels, matters of real and truly surpassing importance. Shall 
this bride acquit herself worthily of her new responsibilities, as 

befits one so highly honored? "Hearken;" bend thine ear; 

consider well and be not fascinated with these splendors to the neg- 
lect of the sacred duties of this new relation. " O daughter" — 

for these suggestive words come from one who speaks as thy 
father, and therefore should be heard with filial, daughterly af- 
fection. " Forget thine own people and the house of thy 

father," with tacit allusion to that great law of the marriage rela- 
tion, that a man shall leave father and mother, and the woman also 
no less, to constitute a new family. (Gen. 2 : 24). So the bride 
of Christ should expel from her heart all her old and earthly loves, 
to give a pure and a whole heart to her affianced Lord, entering 
upon this new relation with a radically changed heart and life, old 
things passing away, and all things, all affections, all the heart's 
love, and all the soul's real life, made new. So shall the King 
greatly desire thy beauty; so thou mayest become sure of his love. 
Such beauty of soul is forever precious in his eyes. He is thy 
Lord, thy husband — to be accepted with the sincerest love and 
obedience of thy heart. Worship thou him with the reverence, 
esteem, and love of a true wife, and even more as he is more than 
a human husband ; higher far than the ideal husband with whom 
in this figurative, illustrative conception, he is compared. 

12. And the daughter of Tyre shall be there with a gift; 
even the rich among the people shall entreat thy favour. 

" The daughter of Tyre," the richest of the nations, with gifts 
shall conciliate thy favor. Here as in Isa. 60: 5-17, and 49: 
18-23, and Ps. 72: 10, the sentiment is that in the fullness of the 



PSALM XLV. 



197 



Messianic times, the wealth of the nations shall be cheerfully laid 
at his feet. In the days of Solomon, Tyre represented the wealth 

of the world. Hence her name is specified here. The word for 

"entreat" demands a broader signification; they shall bring 
presents to conciliate thy good will. They shall make humble 
submission to thee as their supreme and willingly accepted Lord 
and king. 

13. The King's daughter is all glorious within : her 
clothing is of wrought gold. 

"The King's daughter" means here the new bride. "Glorious 
within " — i. e., within her palace, as you see her from without, 
sitting opposite the door. Her clothing is variegated, ornamented 
with gold. 

14. She shall be brought unto the King in raiment of 
needlework : the virgins her companions that follow her 
shall be brought unto thee. 

15. With gladness and rejoicing shall they be brought : 
they shall enter into the King's palace. 

The virgins, her companions, are prominent here, brought in with 
gladness and joy to become (must we not assume ?) permanent 
members of this royal household, and therefore aptly representing 
the Gentile nations introduced with joyful welcome into the great 
family of the Messiah. This sentiment is taken up and expanded 
with most glowing imagery by Isaiah (49 : 6-23 and 60). 

16. Instead of thy fathers shall be thy children, whom 
thou niayest make princes in all the earth. 

"Instead of thy fathers," to share thy heart and thy house, shall 
now and henceforth be thy sons, to be made princes in all the 
earth ; for " the kingdoms of the world are to become thy kingdoms," 
and thou shalt make thy sons " kings and priests unto God." The 
figure seizes upon the highest earthly honor and prosperity to 
represent the future enlargement and the benign world-wide sway 
of the Messiah's kingdom. 

17. I will make thy name to be remembered in all gen- 
erations : therefore shall the people praise thee forever and 
ever. 

"Thy name remembered in all generations ; " the name of Jesus 
known in all the earth, held in honor and love by all the nations; 
one Lord and his name one; the idols utterly perished; Satan's 
throne prostrate and his very name forgotten; Jesus, the pure, 
the lovely and Glorious One, the sole object of worship and praise 
thenceforth and onward forever — such is the consummation of this 
wonderful prophecy! Will there not be joy above and joy below, 
joy among the holy in heaven and joy among the living of earth, 

I 



198 



PSALM XLYI. 



when this "consummation so devoutly to be wished" shall become 
too real to be any longer doubted — shall be truly the glory of 
earth as well as the glory of heaven ! 

PSALM XLVI. 

All the points in this Psalm accord admirably with the times of 
Hezekiah when God interposed for his people as their refuge and 
strength in times of deepest trouble, and when the proud Assyrian 
whose tramp shook the nations was suddenly smitten, and the 
daughters of Zion rejoiced in the God of their salvation. We can 
not affirm with absolute certainty that this Psalm was written on 
that occasion. It may suffice to say, nothing forbids that date and 
occasion; every point is finely adapted to the circumstances of 
that time ; and we get a more vivid and life-like sense of the Psalm 

if we connect it with those historic events. It was consigned to 

the Chief Musician for his use in the service of song in the house 
of the Lord ; written by some of the sons of Korah ; and set to 
female voices — such being the best approved sense of the words, 
" Upon Alamoth." We may think of it as the national song of 
victory, or rather of triumph in God, celebrating not so much the 
prowess of arms, the courage of heroes, the terrible execution of 
the enginery of war, as the might of Israel's God. 

1. God is our refuge and strength, a very present help 
in trouble. 

2. Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be re- 
moved, and though the mountains be carried into the midst 
of the sea ; 

3. Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though 
the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah. 

The first words strike the key-note of this thrilling song — God, the 
refuge and the strength of his prayerful, trusting people. It was in 
times of deepest trouble that he was found their help, exceedingly — 
this being the precise expression in the song. Therefore will we 
never fear [through all the future ages] though the earth be displaced 
and the mountains be agitated in the heart of the seas, i. e., by 
such an earthquake as would uptear the deeply buried mountains 
and toss the ocean-waters heaven high ; though the waters thereof 
roar and foam. These figures — the ocean boiling as a huge caldron — 
every mountain shaking to its deep foundations — represent the 
great nations of the East as thrown into extreme agitation by this 
Assyrian invasion. The kingdom of the ten tribes on the north 
of Judah, had already fallen ; a terrible onslaught was now being 
made upon Judah. In military strength, to human view, she was 
powerless to withstand the Conqueror of the Eastern world. Eela- 



PSALM XLVI. 



199 



tively to her adversaries she was utterly weak, save in one single 

point ; she had the Almighty God on her side ! " Selah ; " pause 

and comtemplate the scene ! Think how safe we were in God our 
Kefuge, and how safe we shall be through all the future ages with 
suchli Kefuge ever at hand in our deepest need ! 

4. Ulieve is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad 
the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the 
Most High. 

One of the boasts of Assyria's king was this: "With the sole 
of my foot have I dried up all the rivers of the besieged places" 
(Isa/37: 25); implying, it would seem, that he expected to subdue 
Jerusalem by cutting off its supply of water. But the resources of 
the Almighty withstood him at this point, providing a river whose 
streams should forever gladden the city of God. Water being one 
of the necessities of life, a river becomes a fit symbol of rich and 
unfailing supply. Eden was not complete without one ; the heav- 
enly paradise rejoices in its " river of the water of life, clear as 
crystal." Water in amount as a river proceeding from under the 
temple, became the symbol in Ezekiel's hand for the redeeming 
power of gospel light and love over the sins and desolations of this 
fallen world (Ezek. 47 : 1-12). Perhaps the germ of this common 
symbol is here. 

5. God is in the midst of her ; she shall not be moved : 
God shall help her, and that right early. 

If the question be asked, What is the security for these blessings 
upon Zion ? here is the answer : " God is in the midst of her ;" his 
earthly dwelling-place is there ; the home of his temple ; the place 
of his visible presence. This is all the guarantee we need. God 
will surely help her, as the Hebrew has it — " at the dawn of the 
morning" — at the turning point from night to day. "Weeping 
may endure for a night" for the people must needs feel their de- 
pendence upon their God and give themselves to prayer. Then, 
once humbled and fully cast upon God for help, he surely comes. 

6. The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved : he 
uttered his voice, the earth melted. 

7. The Lord of hosts is with us ; the God of Jacob is 
our refuge. Selah. 

The song recurs again to the scenes of terror — the formidable 
powers combined against the holy city — to bring to view once more 
the effect of God's glorious interposition. Just then the awful voice 
of God was heard; the earth melted; all hostile forces quailed 
before him. This proves that the Lord of Hosts, God of the armies 
of heaven, Monarch of the heavenly worlds, is on our side — at 
once the God of heaven and the God of Jacob ; he is our refuge ! 

Why should we fear ? " Selah ! " Think of this wonder-working 

God, the unfailing strength and succor of his people ! 



200 



PSALM XLVIL 



8. Come, behold the works of the Lord, what desola- 
tions he hath made in the earth. 

9. He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth ; 
he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he 
burneth the chariot in the fire. 

Once more, come and see what God hath wrought! Mark what 
desolations he hath spread over the earth ! Think of that vast host, 
the pride and glory of Great Assyria : how suddenly are they 
fallen ! Their wars of conquest and terror are at an end ; their 
war-weapons broken ; the chariots of their pride burned in the 
fire. How are they smitten! 

10. Be still, and know that I am God : I will be exalted 
among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. 

11. The Lord of hosts is with us ; the God of Jacob is 
our refuge. Selah. 

11 Be still" — addressed to those hostile nations ; desist from your 
vain endeavors against my people ; know ye that I am God, the 
Almighty, against whom no human power can stand. "I will 
be exalted among all the nations — over all the earth!" Of this 
glorious purpose, those events in the age of Hezekiah were at 
once a proof and a prophecy — a demonstration for the time then 
present; and God's own word for the perpetual ascendency of his 
name and glory over all the earth, through all the coming ages ! 

The joyous refrain of the song brings it fitly to its close. This 

glorious Lord of Hosts dwells among us, the God of his own 
people [ l£ Jacob "] and their everlasting refuge. 



PSALM XLVII. 

Most obviously this Psalm celebrates some victory in which God 
had signally subdued Gentile nations before his people Israel. The 
tone of it throughout is that of exulting triumph and high praises 
to the God of their salvation. It lacks the data for determining 
with certainity its historic occasion, and yet its points harmonize 
so well with the events recorded 2 Chron. 20, as to justify us in 
assuming its reference to those events. On that occasion Moab, 
Ammon, and Edom, had combined their formidable hosts for the 
invasion of Judah. They had crept round the southern extremity 
of the Dead Sea [see the line of their path identified in Eobinson's 
Biblical Researches, vol. 2: 214, 215], and coming northward along 
its western shore had reached Engedi [" Hazezon Tamar"] when 
the tidings of their approach in such force were brought to 
Jehoshaphat. He saw and felt the danger ; despaired of help else- 
where than in God ; and forthwith " proclaimed a fast throughout 
Judah" (v. 3). All Judah came together; and there, while they 



PSALM XLVII. 



201 



stood before the Lord with their little ones, their wives and their 
children (v. 13), God's word dropped upon them through his 
prophet ; " Be not afraid nor dismayed by reason of this great 
multitude, for the battle is not yours but God's " (v. 15) ; " Ye shall 
not need to fight in this battle ; set yourselves ; stand ye still, and 
see the salvation of the Lord with you, O Judah and Jerusalem; 
fear not, nor be dismayed ; to-morrow go ye out against them ; for 

the Lord will be with you " (v. 17). Even so they went forth 

with the song of battle and victory on their lips, saying, " Praise 
the Lord, for his mercy endureth for ever " (v. 21). Then the 
Lord directed ambushments to be set against this host ; they were 
smitten; then they fought each other and fell with an immense 
slaughter. After three days spent in gathering the spoil, on the 
fourth the hosts of Judah assembled in the valley of Berachah 
[blessing] and there they blessed the Lord with songs of praise 
for his redeeming mercy in saving his people and destroying their 
enemies. To that occasion this Ps. 47 would have been eminently 
appropriate. Then they went up to Jerusalem and there again 
they celebrated this wonderful deliverance, probably in the use of 

the Psalm next succeeding this, Ps. 48. In addition to the 

happy adaptation of these songs of praise and triumph to the cir- 
cumstances of that scene, we have the historic fact that the children 
of the Korhites [" Sons of Korah "] " stood up there, prominent 
in that song, to praise the Lord God of Israel with a loud voice 
on high ,' (v. 19). All in all it was a wonderful deliverance. God's 
hand was in it; indeed God's hand was all; other hands were 
practically nothing. His people were there, praying, humbling 
their souls before him and imploringly trustful ; — all the rest was 
God — God in the greatness of his power and in the fullness of his 

loving care for his people. Such was the historic occasion with 

which we have good reason for assuming this Psalm to be identi- 
fied. At every point we shall see its pertinence to this occasion. 

1. O clap your hands, all ye people ; shout unto God with 
the voice of triumph. 

It would be at once most appropriate and most sublime to see 
the whole assembled nation — the fathers, the mothers, the sons, 
and the daughters of Judah, all in concert clap their hands and 
shout unto God with the voice of triumph, i. e., the loud shout of 
joyous exultation. 

2. For the Lord most high is terrible ; he is a great 
King over all the earth. 

3. He shall subdue the people under us, and the nations 
under our feet. 

"For Jehovah, Most High" — he who is at once our own cove- 
nant-keeping God [Jehovah] and the supremely great and glorious 
One, is to be feared — terrible to his foes; Lord of all the earth. 
We are sure he will subdue all the nations under us, for what he 



202 



PSALM XLVII. 



lias done before our eyes proves both his power and his prompt 
readiness to do so. 

4. He shall choose our inheritance for us, the excellency 
of Jacob whom he loved. Selah. 

" Choose our inheritance for us" is to do again what he did in 
covenant with Abraham and in fulfillment through Joshua, i. e., 
give us Canaan and plant us securely therein. To preserve them 
from being driven out by the combined forces of their adjacent 
enemies, was equivalent to replanting them in their own promised 
land. "Selah;" pause and dwell upon the marvelous loving- 
kindness of the Lord our God. 

5. God is gone up with a shout, the Lord with the sound 
of a trumpet. 

" Gone up." Having been down to do battle for us and having 
gained this complete victory, leaving nothing more for us to desire 
and having nothing more for himself to do, what should come 
next but his glorious ascending to his throne in the heavens ? Let 
him ascend therefore with shouts of triumph, amid the paeans of 
victory ! • 

6. Sing praises to God, sing praises : sing praises unto 
our King, sing praises. 

7. For God is King of all the earth : sing ye praises with 
understanding. 

God has shown himself King of all the earth ; extol him there- 
fore with highest praises. This word for "sing" implies the 

joint use of voice and instrument. The word translated " with 
understanding" is that which stands at the head of so many Psalms 
in the sense to instruct — for instruction — of course meaning here, 
perform a "Masch.il;" sing a Psalm for instruction, i. e., one 
which sets forth these most instructive views of the glory, power, 
and loving care of our Great God. 

8. God reigneth over the heathen : God sitteth upon the 
throne of his holiness. 

9. The princes of the people are gathered together, even 
the people of the God of Abraham : for the shields of the 
earth belong unto God : he is greatly exalted. 

God has begun to reign over the heathen ; has seated himself 
upon his high throne as King of nations — of which we have the 
evidence in the wonderful victory we this day celebrate. Already 
the poet-prophet sees the glorious consummation of God's future 
gospel triumphs, saying: "for the princes of the people" — the 
noble-hearted, those high in power over the heathen nations — gather 
themselves together as the people of the God of Abraham, i. e. } 
as being such; or without the word " as," we may translate, being 
the people of the God of Abraham. "For the shields," the 



PSALM XLVIII. 



203 



great protectors of the earth, belong of right to God; he is exalted 

high above them all and they are only his servants. The 

thought in these verses is put by John (Rev. 11 : 15) in the sublime 
words — " The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdom of 
our Lord and of his Christ and he shall reign forever and ever." 
Should it surprise us that such, a victory as that wrought before 
the eyes of Jehoshaphat and of his praying, worshiping people 
should suggest this grandly sublime result of the gospel age and 
of its wonderful appliances and forces for human salvation? 

PSALM XLVIII. 

It was said in the introduction to Ps. 47 that this Psalm stands 
in close relations to that, and therefore was probably written on 
the same general occasion, viz. : the victory of Jehoshaphat over 
the combined forces of Moab, Ammon, and Edom, narrated 2 Chron. 
20. This is rendered the more probable because the history pro- 
vides for two special celebrations of that victory ; one in the valley 
of blessing [Berachah] (2 Chron. 20: 26), and the other on their 
arrival at Jerusalem (vs. 27, 28) to which they came " with psalteries 
and harps and trumpets into the house of the Lord.'' As Ps. 47 
is in every point adapted to the former of these celebrations, so is 
this to the latter. I shall therefore assume that the Psalm was 
composed for that occasion and shall interpret accordingly. 

1. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised in the 
city of our God, in the mountain of his holiness. 

By this wonderful overthrow of the enemies of Judah, the 
Lord had shown himself to be both great and worthy of the 
highest praises possible to mortals. It was specially appropriate 
that he should be thus praised " in the city of our God, in his holy 
mountain" because this was the city which his interposing arm 
had saved from capture and destruction. Full of the fresh joy 
of this scene, the hosts of Judah thronged the temple with loudest 
songs of praise to God for this deliverance. 

2. Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is 
mount Zion, on the sides of the north, the city of the great 
King, # - * 

3. God is known in her palaces for a refuge. 

Did Mount Zion ever look more fair to those enraptured eyes? 
Only a few hours ago in danger of war, siege, capture, conflagra- 
tion, utter destruction ; now standing saved, untouched, in more 
than its former glory ;— we need not wonder then that her joyful 
sons and daughters should sing: "Beautiful for elevation, the joy 
of all the land" [perhaps prospectively of all the "earth"] "is 
this our Mount Zion," especially as seen from the north ; the city 



204 



PSALM XLVIII. 



honored as the home and throne of the Great King ! In her palaces 
we have known and proved our God to be our Kefuge. In our 
danger we sought him — not in vain ! 

4. For, lo, the kings were assembled, they passed by 
together. 

5. They saw it, and they marveled ; they were troubled, 
and hasted away. 

6. Fear took hold upon them there, and pain, as of a 
woman in travail. 

7. Thou breakest the ships of Tarshish with an east wind. 

u Lo;" behold these facts of our history; think how the kings 
of the south and of the east gathered their hosts and came upon 
us ; but all suddenly they passed away together. They came near 
enough to see the towers of our glorious city [perhaps from the 
heights of Tekoa; see Robinson's Researches, vol. 2: p. 182, 183] 
but in a moment, panic-smitten, confounded, thrown into inex- 
tricable confusion, they fell upon each other in deadly conflict and 
fled in consternation. It was as when the typhoons of the east 

shatter to atoms the huge ships of Tarshish. The facts of this 

history stand in these words : "When they began to sing and to 
praise, the Lord set ambushments against the children of Amnion. 
Moab, and Mount Seir which were come against Judah ; and they 
were smitten. For the children of Ammon stood up against the 
inhabitants of Mount Seir, utterly to slay and destroy them ; and 
when they had made an end of the inhabitants of Seir, every one 
helped to destroy another. And when Judah came unto the watch- 
tower in the wilderness, they looked unto the multitudes, and be- 
hold they were dead bodies, fallen to the earth and none escaped " 
(2 Chron. 20: 22-24). So perished those hosts of Zion's enemies ! 

8. As we have heard, so have we seen in the city of the 
Lord of hosts, in the city of our God : God will establish 
it forever. Selah. 

We had heard with our ears of the glorious victories of Zion's 
God over her foes in the 'ages past; but now our eyes have seen. 
Now we have another, even a fresh demonstration that God will 
establish his kingdom forever. When his people put their trust 
in him and seek his help in humble prayer and fasting, he can not 
let them fall before their enemies. Their salvation, committed 

humbly to his hand, is forever sure. "Selah;" think of this and 

lay it up in your hearts, ye people of God, throughout all the ages. 

9. We have thought of thy loving-kindness, O God, in 
the midst of thy temple. 

"Have thought of thy loving-kindness;" the Hebrew word sug- 
gesting the idea of comparison ; we have thought of it in the light 
of this wonderful illustration — the recent overthrow of our enemies. 



PSALM XLIX. 



205 



10. According to thy name, O God, so is thy praise unto 
the ends of the earth : thy right hand is full of righteous- 
ness. 

"Thy names," e. g., the Mighty One; the One exalted Most 
High ; the ever faithful and changeless One ; have ever brought 
before us thy glorious qualities of being and of character. So shall 
thy praise be according to what thou art. Thou shall be praised 
to' the very ends of the earth according to thine infinite worth. 
Thy right hand doeth all righteous things — is full of righteous 
achievements, as we have seen in this destruction of our wicked 
enemies. 

11. Let mount Zion rejoice, let the daughters of Judah 
be glad, because of thy judgments. 

"Daughters of Judah" may perhaps mean in this connection 
the suburban villages in a manner dependent for protection upon 
the mother city. This usage appears Josh. 15 : 45, 47, in a prosaic 
geographical statement. But the more obvious construction refers 
it to the mothers and their female offspring who had special occa- 
sion to dread the horrors of war. Let them, therefore, be fore- 
most in these thank-offerings of praise to God for his righteous 
judgments in destroying their enemies. 

12. Walk about Zion, and go round about her : tell the 
towers thereof. 

13. Mark { ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces ; 
that ye may tell it to the generation following. 

14. For this God is our God forever and ever : he will 
be our guide even unto death. 

The sweetly solemn and joyous thought that Zion still stands 
unharmed, only the more beautiful for the recent danger and the 
now assured safety which re-indorses her everlasting security in 
God, seems to prompt the words before us. Walk all round about 
our Zion. Note every tower in its place, every bulwark in its full 
strength, all her palaces in their untarnished glory. Mark all 
this, and then send it down to coming generations to bear witness 
all along the ages that the God who hath wrought all this for us 
is our own God forever and ever; who will guide us in safety and 
crown us with blessings even unto death ; long as there shall be 
people who trust him and need his protecting care for their con- 
tinued salvation. 

PSALM XLIX. 

This Psalm, ascribed to some one of the sons of Korah as its 
author, is not apparently an outgrowth of any special historical 
occasion, but like Ps. 37 deduces its moral instruction from a largo 



206 



PSALM XLIX. 



class of facts manifest in common life. Its moral purpose is to 
set forth the vanity of wealth and its utter lack of power against 
death, and by implication, against any of the greater evils of hu- 
man life. Over against the emptiness of riches toward meeting 
these vital wants of man stand the fullness and glory of God's love 
and protection for his trusting people. 

1. Hear this, all ye people ; give ear, all ye inhabitants 
of the world: 

2. Both, low and high, rich and poor, together. 

The Psalm opens by calling the attention of all people, of every 
possible rank in life. The Hebrew language has two very unlike 
words for man; one drawn from the earth, and significant of 
frailty; the other significant of his relative strength and nobility. 
Both are brought together here: man, the low; and man, the high. 
This distinction is germain to the present theme ; an admonition to 
the rich and the nobly-born, suggesting that they forbear to set un- 
due value on wealth and honor, and a comfort to the poor of hum- 
ble origin, inasmuch as the more enduring good of God's favor and 
love are free to their choice and fully within their attainment. 

3. My mouth shall speak of wisdom ; and the meditation 
of my heart shall be of understanding. 

4. I will incline mine ear to a parable : I will open my 
dark sayings upon the harp. 

"Wisdom" and "understanding" have here the meaning com- 
mon in the Proverbs of Solomon, practical sound sense iu the 
choice of the highest and best good of life, viz., God's favor and 

love — far above all the glittering, fallacious treasures of earth. 

" I will incline mine ear ; " but why should a writer say this ? One 
who writes or speaks may fitly desire the inclined, attentive ear of 
his hearers or readers; but what has he to do with inclining his 

own ear to a parable or to any hearing whatever? The answer 

is : If you think of this author as giving his own thought without 
inspiration from God, you must say, he inclines his ear to the dictates 
of his own judgment, or to the fancies of his own imagination; but 
if you have reason to account him inspired, then, that he bends his 
ear with atttentive docility to the voice divine that speaks within. 
The present case is of the latter sort. " My dark saying," trans- 
lates a Hebrew word which primarily means a riddle, an enigma ; 
and then passes into the sense of poetry, a composition to be sung 

with perhaps a musical accompaniment as here. To "open" is 

not here to begin, but to unfold, to set forth clearly. 

5. Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil, whe?i the 
iniquity of my heels shall compass me about? 

The writer, speaking for others as well as himself, represents one 
who is the object of malicious persecution from men of rank and 
wealth. "But why should I fear in these days of my affliction 



PSALM XLIX. 



207 



when the iniquity of my ensnarers. the malicious schemes of those 
who would ensnare my heels, environs me round about ? for these 
rich men have at best but small power." "Of my heels," is suf- 
ficiently literal, but comes far short of giving the true sense. The 
writer does not speak of the agency of his own heels, much less of 
their agency as being wicked. He is describing those who way- 
laid his feet, or as we might say dogged his heels from behind; set 
upon him with dark, malicious intent to trip, cast down, and 
destroy. 

6. They that trust in their wealth, and boast themselves 
in the multitude of their riches ; 

7. None of tliem can by any means redeem his brother, 
nor give to God a ransom for him : 

8. (For the redemption of their soul is precious, and it 
ceaseth forever :) 

9. That he should still live forever, and not see cor- 
ruption. 

With all his wealth not a man of them can redeem his brother 
from death and the grave ! They may have unbounded trust in 
their riches, they may make any amount of display of their abund- 
ant wealth, and may shine before the eyes of men [so the He- 
brew word for " boast" implies] ; but God will by no means accept 
their gold as a ransom from the grave. Such redemption of the 
soul [life] is costly (better than "precious"); it costs too much for 
them to pay in gold. No rubies can equal it; no millionaire can 
raise money enough to buy off his soul from the exacting demand 
of Death. "It ceaseth forever" — rather, one desists from the effort 
forever, or he utterly and forever fails to make up an adequate ran- 
som, and therefore all hope of success perishes forever. The for- 
mer seems to be more precisely the sense of the original: man 
must give over the effort in eternal despair ! The richest of men 
will not, can not, live forever so as not to see the corruptions of the 
grave. The words ascribed to a dying queen are in point here : 
"Millions of money for one inch of time ! " 

10. For he seeth that wise men die, likewise the fool and 
the brutish person perish, and leave their wealth to others. 

11. Their inward thought is, that their houses shall con- 
tinue forever, and their dwelling-places to all generations ; 
they call their lands after their own names. 

" For" assigns a reason for accepting the truth previously 
stated. Every observer of human life will see that the rich, 
whether wise or foolish, die and are compelled to leave their 
hoarded wealth to others. It matters not how wise they may have 
been, nor on the other hand how foolish or even brutish : all alike 
must in their time go down to the grave and leave their riches to 
others. They may have inwardly thought that their houses would 



208 



PSALM XLIX. 



stand forever, and they may have tacitly assumed that their own 
life would be as permanent as their earthly mansions. They may 
have even given their own names to their estates and magnificent 
establishments; but, alas ! even this insures no perpetuity to their 
own frail life. So perish all man's vain hopes of an earthly im- 
mortality ! A few days or years only, and he is numbered with 
the dead, and the places that kneAv him once shall know him no 
more ! 

12. Nevertheless man being in honour abideth not : he 
is like the beasts that perish. 

13. This their way is their folly : yet their posterity ap- 
prove their sayings. Selah. 

Although their inner thought assumes for themselves an indefi- 
nitely long life, and they give their own names to their homes as if 
they were to dwell there for ages, yet they abide not, even for a 
night ; theirs is but the life of a day. Much as they were honored 
for the moment (for wealth gives men a certain distinction), yet as 
to their hold on life, they are like the beasts; they soon perish. 
The verb translated "abideth" means strictly, to stay over night. 
" Beasts" is the usual word for domestic cattle, often brought sud- 
denly from the stall to the slaughter. Or if the word should in- 
clude beasts in general, yet their life-term is brief and is referred 

to as being so. "This is their way and their folly" — their 

"way" in the sense of their course of life; and their "folly" with 
reference to the groundless and ruinous assumption they make as 
to long life and permanent prosperity. This word for "folly" has 
the sense primarily of hope; next, of hopes cherished without rea- 
son, presumptuously, foolishly — as here. Yet despite of their 

folly and of the perpetual frustration of their hopes and assump- 
tions, their followers still approve their principles and consequently 
hold fast to the same delusions. The Hebrew word for " pos- 
terity" need not be restricted to their offspring; nor does it em- 
brace all their survivors ; but should rather be taken in the sense 
of their admirers who have deemed them fortunate men while 
they lived, yet give no heed to the lessons which Wisdom would 
draw from their early death and their utter failure to reach the 

true ends of life. Let the reader note how true to the human 

nature and life of to-day are these records of the life and thought 

of the rich and worldly men of twenty-five hundred years ago. 

"Selah; " let this be thought of deeply and laid to heart. 

14. Like sheep they are laid in the grave ; death shall 
feed on them ; and the upright shall have dominion over 
them in the morning ; and their beauty shall consume in 
the grave from their dwelling. 

Shepherd-life supplies the figures in the first two clauses. Men 
put them in the grave like sheep, i. e. } as they drive sheep in flocks 



PSALM XLIX. 



209 



to the slaughter ; Death shall be their shepherd, taking them in 
charge as the shepherd does his flock. This seems to be the pre- 
cise sense of the Hebrew verb and its pronoun. They are as 
sheep, both in their wholesale slaughter, and in their falling un- 
der the control of Death, conceived of as the monarch of the 
myriads of the dead. — —The upright shall tread over their fresh 
graves "in the morning," for their pleasure-life has been said 
(v. 12) not to outlast the night. Soon therefore as the morning 
comes, they are in their graves ; and the upright, no longer perse- 
cuted by their rich and proud oppressors, now tread over their 
fresh graves with a keen sense of God's swift retribution upon the 

wicked. "Their beauty" [literally their form, all that was 

mortal] shall be for Sheol [the grave] to consume — they being far 
away from their earthly dwellings. This paraphrase assumes an 
allusion in the word "dwelling" to those "dwelling-places" which 
they vainly dreamed would endure "to all generations" (v. 11). 

Now they are driven from those to far other habitations. These 

last words of the verse — "from their dwellings" — are felt by all 
critics to be difficult, mainly, it would seem, because the sentence 
is so very elliptical. But assuming a reference to v. 11 we have a 
fair and an exceedingly impressive sense both for this clause and 
for the entire verse. These men, wicked, proud, and rich, are 
hurried in throngs, like sheep, from their splendid palaces and 
magnificent estates into the dark and dismal grave — Death their 
shepherd there. Corruption quickly mars their beauty. The 
earthly homes they built for immortality are their dwelling-places 
no longer. 

15. But God will redeem my soul from the power of the 
grave : for he shall receive me. Selah. 

God and he only will redeem my soul from the hand of Sheol ; 
for he will take me, i. e., to himself. No such state awaits me in 
the under-world as awaits the ungodly; for my God will take me 
to his own mansions. The force of the first Hebrew word "only" 
is quite left out in the English version. It is a thought too 
precious to be missed. God alone; no other arm save his; I know 
no other; I trust none other; God by his own divine arm will 
redeem my soul from the death-power of Sheol, and from his 
dominion, compared just before to that of the shepherd controlling 
his sheep. 

16. Be not thou afraid when one is made rich, when the 
glory' of bis house is increased. 

17. For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away : his 
glory shall not descend after him. 

When one becomes rich fear* not his power ; envy not his pros- 
perity ; aspire not after the increasing glory of his house, for 
when he dieth not one thing of all he had can he take away with 
him. His glory shall not go down to Sheol after him, i. e., to meet 



210 



PSALM L. 



and rest upon him there. Ah no ; he goes down to the grave more 
than empty; -worse than naked. 

18. Though while he lived he blessed his soul, (and men 
will praise thee, when thou doest well to thyself.) 

19. He shall go to the generation of his fathers ; they 
shall never see light. 

Though long as he lives he will think himself blest with all that 
heart can wish, perpetually nattered as a prosperous and happy 
man, for men will praise thee if thou doest well for thyself — if 
thou takest supreme care of thine own worldly interests, even to 
the piling up of great estates. Yet this man must go to the gen- 
eration of his fathers, dying like mortal men. None of them shall 
ever see the joyous light of a true prosperity. 

20. Man that is in honor, and understandeth not, is like 
the beasts that perish. 

No matter how high in honor or how full of riches, yet if he 
lack understanding ; if he lives the fool ; if he builds his earthly 
palace for immortality, saying: " Soul, thou hast much goods laid 
up for many years ; now take thine ease and be merry, and let 
God be forgotten, he is like the beasts that perish. His God-given 
intelligence, his reason and conscience — divinest gifts of heaven — 
have utterly failed to lift him above the earthly life of the brutes. 
He goes to his grave as they to theirs — save that he has some 
fearful elements in his account before God which can never enter 

into their lot. On two distinct occasions, both recorded by 

Luke (12: 16-21, and 16: 19-31) Jesus spake of the rich sinner 
in a strain remarkably analogous to that of this Psalm, and almost 
without doubt, with these words in his mind: "I will say to my 
soul, 'Soul, thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take 
thine ease; eat, drink, and be merry.' But God said to him; 
Thou fool! This night thy soul shall be required of thee; then 

whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?" "The 

rich man also died and was buried; and in hell he lifted up his 
eyes, being in torments," etc. Well understood and duly con- 
sidered, such fearful facts touching the doom of the wicked, how- 
ever prosperous in wealth and honor, must surely show and im- 
press the folly of such a life — the unutterable woes of such a 
death ! 

PSALM L. 

This Psalm is ascribed to Asaph as its author, in the usual form 
in -which Psalms are ascribed to David. The history (2 Chron. 
29 : 30), speaks of Asaph as a " seer," classing him with David as 
an author of songs of praise. (See also 1 Chron. 25: 1, 2). This 
Asaph was contemporary with David, active in the scenes connected 



PSALM L. 



211 



with placing the ark on Mfc. Zion (1 Chron. 15: 17, 19). The 

theme of this Psalin is, God, the Judge of all the earth, holding 
men to sincere and honest -worship of God and to intrinsic right- 
eousness toward men, i. e., to obedience as to both the first table of 
the law and the second. Under the first head, God does not 
reprove his people for failure in the external rites of sacrifice and 
offering, but insists upon thanksgiving, the payment of vows, and 

prayer for divine help in all trouble. The wicked he rebukes 

lor insincere religion ; for a heart utterly out of sympathy with 
God's word and will, and in sympathy with thieves, adulterers, and 

with slander of nearest friends. If the question be asked, Is 

this Psalm a prediction of the final judgment-scene, of the same 
class with Matt. 25 : 31-46, and Acts 17: 31 ? the answer must be, 
Not precisely. As to form and drapery, this is rather an ideal 
scene, representing the invisible judgment which God continually 
exercises over his moral subjects. Strictly, the first verbs are in 
the past tense, setting forth that God had even then already spoken, 
and already summoned the whole earth before his tribunal. This 
Psalm, it will be noticed, is silent as to those final awards of eter- 
nal blessedness to the righteous and endless woe to the wicked, 
which are prominent features of the last judgment-scene as given 
by our Lord. Hence this Psalm was not intended precisely to 
predict that future judgment-scene, but rather to show that God is 
really the Judge of att % and especially that he searches men's 
hearts ; demands sincere worship, love, and obedience, and can not 
be imposed upon by any sort of pretension. The points made in 
this Psalm by no means supersede the necessity of the final judg- 
ment as revealed in the New Testament. On the other hand, they 
fully recognize the principle which underlies that final judgment ; 
they prove a demand for it in this moral world ; and are therefore 
to be regarded, as in a sort, anticipating its essential features and 
verifying its certainty. 

1. The mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, and 
called the earth from the rising of the sun unto the going 
down thereof. 

The Psalm opens with the three most common and distinct 
names of God — El, Elohim, Jehovah — best rendered, the Al- 
mighty, God, Jehovah or Lord. The first gives the element of 
supreme power ; the second, that combination of infinite qualities 
which makes him the only proper object of worship; the third, 
makes prominent his changeless, eternal nature, and consequently 
his faithfulness to his word. The name Jehovah commonly rep- 
resents him as the God of his covenant people. This Great God 

hath spoken and hath convened the whole earth, summoning all 
before his tribunal, from extremest -East to remotest West. 

2. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God hath 
shined. 



212 



PSALM L. 



" Hath shined," in the sense of revealing himself, his spiritual 

nature, and .his law for men. " Out of Zion," as the place of 

his earthly abode. " The perfection of beauty, — with some ref- 
erence, perhaps, to its physical features (See Ps. 48 : 2), but with 
more reference to the beauty and glory conferred on Zion by the 
presence of her all-glorious King. 

3. Our God shall come, and shall not keep silence : a 
fire shall devour before him, and it shall be very tempestu- 
ous round about him. 

4. He shall call to the heavens from above, and to the 
earth, that he may judge his people. 

" Come," that most expressive word, always signifies some ex- 
traordinary manifestation of presence and power. He is no longer 
silent but speaks; is no longer at apparent distance, but draws 
sensibly near. As on Sinai, fire invests him round about and es- 
pecially proceeds before him to manifest his presence. " Shall be 
tempestuous " translates a single verb which signifies a fearful 
storm in action, one which impresses the utmost terror and conster- 
nation. Coming thus in glorious majesty, he convokes the heavens 

and the earth that he may judge his people — \, e. } in their presence. 

5. Gather my saints together unto me ; those that have 
made a covenant with me by sacrifice. 

6. And the heavens shall declare his righteousness: for 
God is judge himself. Selah. 

First, let the professed saints of God be gathered — those who 
made a covenant with God over or upon the sacrifice — said with 
reference to the usual form of ratifying a covenant over slain ani- 
mals. Instances of such ratification may be seen, Gen. 15 : 9-18, 

and Ex. 24: 5-8. The heavens, assumed to be present as 

witnesses, shall testify to God's righteousness, for it is God him- 
self who is the Judge. Do not the pure, exalted minds, peopling 
the heavens, know the infinite righteousness of their God ? And 
is it not pertinent to make this appeal to them to testify and set 
forth [the sense of this Hebrew word] his spotless righteous- 
ness? " Selah; " pause in profound awe; for the great trial is 

about to open. 

7. Hear, O my people, and I will speak ; O Israel, and 
I will testify against thee : I am God, even thy God. 

Appropriately the court opens with a call for profound atten- 
tion. The case of God's professed people Israel comes on first in 
order. The Lord declares himself to be their God, in covenant 
relation with them, although they have apparently forgotten and 
virtually disowned this covenant by their reckless violation of its 
obligations. 

8. I will not reprove thee for thy sacrifices or thy burnt 
offerings, to have been continually before me. 



PSALM L. 



213 



9. I will take no bullock out of thy house, nor he-goats 
out of thy folds : 

10. For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle 
upon a thousand hills. 

11. I know all the fowls of the mountains : and the wild 
beasts of the field are mine. 

I am not now rebuking thee for neglecting the forms and 
ritualities of sacrifice. This is not the charge brought against 
thee. It is not thy bullocks or he-goats that I now demand. All 
the cattle of the earth — the wild and the tame — are mine. I have 

no occasion to ask of you even one of them for myself. The 

"beasts of the forest" are wild animals, while the cattle on the 

hills are domestic. The tone of these verses seem to imply that 

Israel had not been specially deficient in the rituals and externals 
of the Mosaic system. It also implies that God regards the wor- 
ship of the heart as incomparably more important than these ex- 
ternals. 

12. If I were hungry, I would not tell thee : for the world 
is mine, and the fullness thereof. 

13. Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of 
goats ? 

Had they supposed that, like themselves, the Lord needs these 
animals for food? If so, how egregiously had they misconceived 
his nature! 

14. Offer unto God thanksgiving ; and pay thy vows 
unto the Most High : 

15. And call upon me in the day of trouble : I will de- 
liver thee, and thou shalt glorify me. 

On the side of things positively required, stand thanksgiving — 
the grateful acknowledgment of mercies received from God; a 
perpetual recognition of his favors and of the love from which 
they come. Next, the payment of votes unto the Most High, i. e., 
honest and truthful dealing with God, recognizing him as really 
existing, and a vow to him therefore as a real obligation to a per- 
sonal being. Next (remarkably) God invites (shall we not say 

requires ?) them to call upon himself in the day of their trouble, 
giving the promise that in such case he will set them free from 
such trouble and they shall glorify him for this deliverance. The 
beautiful thing here is that God seems to recognize it as one of 
his rights and privileges to be called upon by his people for help 
in their time of need, asking only that then they suitably ac- 
knowledge his delivering grace and give him the honor due there- 
for. Is it not wonderful ? Yet it is like God ! 

16. But unto the wicked God saith, What hast thou to 

10 



214 



PSALM L. 



do to declare my statutes, or that thou sliouldest take my 
covenant in thy mouth? 

17. Seeing thou hatest instruction, and castest my words 
behind thee. 

Of the two classes brought before God in this Psalm for judicial 
examination and appropriate rebuke and instruction, the former 
are styled "my people" (v. 7); the latter, as here, "the wicked." 
But it must not be inferred that God finds no sin in the former 
class, nor that the latter class make no pretensions to piety and 
have nothing to do with God's law. The distinction seems rather 
to be one of degree — the latter more openly wicked and immoral 
than the former. So they appear in points made here descriptive 
of their character. "What hast thou to do?" etc., is the He- 
brew idiom which asks What right or what business hast thou to 
declare my statutes? The word for "declare" means primarily 
to count, number; then to set forth in order; to recount, narrate. 
The formal repetition of the law in reading or in public rehearsal 
might naturally come under this word. The Lord therefore says 
here: What right hast thou, O wicked man, to rehearse the words 
of my law as if thou wert recognizing its obligations; and by what 
right dost thou take my covenant solemnly upon thy lips while in 
thy heart thou hatest instruction and castest my words behind 
thee as unworthy of thj regard and as having no claim on thy 
obedience — no claim which thou art bound to respect? Why 
shouldest thou insult thy Maker so ? This earnest rebuke ap- 
plies in all its force to those who by acts more or less public 
recognize God's law as binding and take his covenant into their 
lips, yet in heart hate the restraints of duty to God, hate the in- 
struction which demands a holy life, and thrust from them the 
claims of God. 

18. When thou sawest a thief, then thou consentedst with 
him, and hast been partaker with adulterers. 

The point charged here against this wicked man is not that he 
is first in the sins named, but second ; not that he leads, but that 
he follows. He shows that his heart is radically in love with sin. 
If he sees a thief, suddenly he is charmed, fascinated ; he loves 
him and comes at once into sympathy with him. So of adulterers; 
he falls in at once and takes his lot with them. Literally, with 
adulterers is thy chosen portion. Thy heart draws thee into their 

communion, and of course into their sin. This way of bringing 

out the sin of the heart is strikingly sharp and clear. The- probe 
goes down to the bottom of the sore. Like Ithuriel's spear, its 
touch brings up the covered sin. 

19. Thou givest thy mouth to evil, and thy tongue 
frameth deceit. 

20. Thou sittest and speakest against thy brother ; thou 
slanderest thine own mother's son. 



PSALM L. 



215 



Mischief and slander are brought out here. The first verb — 
11 givest" — is strong; sendest forth, giving it unbounded range and 
no restraint ; making the doing of evil its distinct and direct 
function, its mission, its business. The tongue concocts deceit- 
artful schemes for mischief. " Sittest and speakest" — as if 

sitting down to a day's work, making a business of slander. 

In the last clause of v. 20 the verb and noun translated " thou 
slanderest" are taken by most critics to mean — to put a stumbling- 
block before him. Dr. Alexander translates — to "aim a blow," 
"give a thrust." The parallelism leads us to interpret of a blow 

at reputation, a thrust at one's good name. It fearfully heightens 

his guilt that no relationship is too dear or sacred to save one 
from the venom of his slanderous tongue. His own brother, born 
of the same mother, is specified as an illustration of the strength 
of that propensity to slander which breaks through all the 
restraints of the tenderest relationship. Alas ! what a view of 
human nature ! Since this showing is often but too true, we must 
also say, How fearfully depraved is this fallen nature ! 

21. These things hast thou done, and I kept silence ; thou 
thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself : but I 
will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes. 

" Because vengeance against an evil work is not executed speedily, 
therefore the heart is fully set on eviL" So here: While thou 
wast committing these sins I kept silence ; and then, so far from 
interpreting this silence as only the long suffering of God designed 
for salvation, to give thee space to repent, thou thoughtest that I 
was really and entirely like thyself — well enough pleased with sin 

and sinners. The original word for " thoughtest" suggests the 

idea of comparison ; thou wert comparing God with thyself. In- 
asmuch as God manifested no displeasure against thy sin, thou 
wert assuming that like thyself he felt none. But I must correct 
this mistake; I must put an end to this false inference; I must 
fearfully rebuke this abuse of my forbearance. I shall set the 

truth of this matter in sunlight before thine eyes ! Ah, indeed, 

and why should he not ? How can he afford to leave such mis- 
conceptions of himself uncorrected ? How can he endure that 
such license in sin should be inferred from his merciful forbearance, 
and sinners become more and more fearfully hardened in sin by 
reason of his "keeping silence?" 

22. Now consider this, ye that forget God, lest I tear 
you in pieces, and there be none to deliver. 

"Consider this" at once, without delay, ye forgetters of God; 
know ye that your God and judge sees into the utmost depths of 
your guilty souls, strips off every covering from your concealed in- 
iquity, is grieved and indignant that you should so abuse his silent 
forbearance ; and therefore can wait in silence no longer, but give3 
you one last warning. Consider, repent, lest his righteous justice 



216 



PSALM LI. 



tear and there be none to deliver ! This word, " tear in pieces," 

is the Hebrew term for the rending of human flesh by the lion and 
tiger — a terrible figure of speech to set forth the retributive judg- 
ments of the Almighty for the incorrigible sins of men ! 

23. Whoso offereth praise glorifieth me : and to him 
that ordereth his conversation aright will I show the salva- 
tion of God. 

Whoso makes praise his sacrificial offering, i. e., offers praise as 
the Israelites were to offer animals in sacrifice, gives due honor to 
God — the honor of the heart which he required (v. 14). To him 
who rightly shapes his way, his moral course of life, I will show 
my salvation. The word " conversation " here must be carefully 
taken in its ancient, not its modern sense — in the sense of one's 
entire life, not by any means of one's speech only. The original 
has no specific reference to speech, though obviously it must in- 
clude words along with deeds. The specifications of the Psalm 
include slander and sins of the tongue, but by no means exclude 
all other sins. The demand is that men be honestly, con- 
scientiously careful to obey God's entire law, and shape their 
whole life into harmony with his revealed will. So doing they 
shall richly experience his salvation. * 

OO^OO 

PSALM LI. 

Every feature in this Psalm concurs with the caption to show 
that David wrote it to express his penitence and his prayers for 
mercy after the rebuke of Nathan the prophet had brought his great 
sin in the matter of Bathsheba and Uriah fully before his mind, 
and the Spirit of God had brought the conviction of his guilt 
heavily upon his heart. The historical account of this great sin 
appears 2 Sam. 11; the rebuke of Nathan, 2 Sam. 12: 1-14. 
David's reply to this rebuke is given there in fewest but most ex- 
pressive words: "I have sinned against the Lord." Ps. 32, as we 
have seen, treats of this case and gives some of its points with 
great pertinence and force. This Psalm holds the mind closely 
to David's bitter repentance and to his most earnest supplications 
for mercy and for such moral cleansing as should save him ever- 
more from falling again before any possible power of temptation. 
Assigned to " the chief musican " for perpetual use in the service 
of song before the congregation of Israel, it testifies that no false 
modesty and no indulged pride withheld him from making his 
confession as public as his sin had been notorious. He had sin- 
ned before the nation ; so he would have his repentance go forth 
before not the nation only, but the world. 

1. Have mercy upon me, O God, according to thy 



PSALM LT. 



217 



loving-kindness : according unto the multitude of thy tender 
mercies blot out my transgressions. 

2. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity, and cleanse 
me from my sin. 

Overwhelmed -with a sense of guilt and ill-desert, what could he 
do, king though he "was, but cry for mercy, resting his plea upon 
the known "loving-kindness and tender mercies" of his God? 
His only hope lay here — he had known that the infinitely holy 
and righteous God could forgive the penitent. Therefore without 
one word or thought of self-defense or even extenuation, admitting 
every thing, confessing all, and humbling himself low before God, 
he pleads for mercy — mercy simple and pure — nothing else. Yet 
he would add, not in the line of self-vindication, but of conscious 
weakness and of inexpressible longings to be kept pure henceforth 
and forever ; " Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity ; cleanse 
me from my sin." Take away from me, not only the condemnation 
under which my guilty soul might justly sink, but the very spirit 
of sinning — that pollution of soul which makes sin morally possi- 
ble. " Cleanse me" — that I sin no more. 

3. For I acknowledge my transgressions : and my sin is 
ever before me. 

4. Against thee, thee only, have I sinned, and done this 
evil in thy sight: that thou mightest be justified when thou 
speakest, and be clear when thou judgest. 

Primarily, this means : " For I know my transgression ; my sin 
is continually before me." I see it; I can not ignore it; the deep 

consciousness of its guilt will go with me to my grave. No 

doubt it is implied also that he publicly "acknowledged," i. e., 
confessed his sin and guilt in this matter. But this language pri- 
marily contemplates his relation to God, and so far forth, what he 
means to say is that he is deeply, painfully, sensible of his sin. 
He says, "J know it!" It is a relief to his burdened soul to say 
this and to place himself before God in this only true attitude — a 

consciously guilty sinner. "Against thee, thee .only, have I 

sinned ; " — the relations of this sin toward thee altogether eclipse 
all its other relations. I can scarcely think of any thing else ; I 
have done the evil toward thee, abusing thy love, outraging all my 
most sacred obligations, requiting, with this awful crime, the honors 
conferred on me in putting me upon the throne over this thy great 

people — Ah ! what have I not done to offend and grieve thee ! 

I say this to justify thee, 0 my God, in the most severe sentence 
thou mayest pronounce against me, to clear thee of all wrong, how- 
ever terrible thy judgments upon me may be. This I take to 

be the sense of the last clause of v. 4. To make David say, I have 
sinned against thee, O God, to the end that, or in order that, thou 
mayest be justified in condemning me, is to miss his meaning 
egregiously. But that he should say : I make this fullest possible 



218 



PSALM LI. 



confession of my sins as specially against thee, so that thou mayest 
be vindicated in the severest inflictions upon me therefor, is 
germain to his state of feeling; is in itself intrinsically right, and 
is therefore, I judge, to be accepted as his meaning. 

5. Behold, I was shapen in iniquity ; and in sin did my 
mother conceive me. 

For many and cogent reasons, this verse demands the most 
thoughtful and candid attention. We should labor to interpret it 
so as to do justice to David's feelings, and much more, to the "ways 

of God, the Great Creator and Father. The verb translated 

"was shapen" must mean was born. The verse therefore undeni- 
ably speaks of the time-point of birth and of conception in the womb. 
"What does it affirm ? So far as I can see, we are to choose be- 
tween these four supposable constructions. 

1. I was conceived and born with sin on the part of my mother — 
in or under her sin. 

2. I was conceived and born a sinful thing. 

3. I was conceived and born actually sinning. 

4. I was conceived and born of a sinning race, with the antece- 
dent occasions of sin in my constitution, rendering it morally cer- 
tain that I should fall before temptation. 

Let us examine these suppositions in their order. 

1. It bears strongly, and in my view unanswerably, against the 
first proposed construction that David was in no mood of mind to 
impute his sin and the blame of it to his mother. True confession 
of one's own sin has not the least sympathy with throwing the 
blame of it upon another. No sinner since the world began, 
under genuine and wholesome conviction of the guilt of his own 
sin, has ever yet believed or felt that the blame of it was really 
chargeable upon his mother. True conviction of guilt does not 
work that way — never brings out that result. "We must therefore 
reject this construction as incompatible with David's spirit at this 
time, and with the facts of the case. 

2. Conceived and born a sinful thing. Of course I use the word 
"thing" here as entirely distinct from an active agent; in fact, in 

contrast with the idea of voluntary, responsible moral action. 

This construction of the passage holds that at the time-point of 
conception and of birth, the material body is a corrupt sinful 
thing, and that the yet undeveloped moral powers are in some sort 
of anticipation, sinful also. It is common to argue this from 
physical analogies, e. g., that the stream proves the nature of the 
fountain; or from the analogies of brute instinct: the new-born 
adder or the infant tiger has all the nature it will ever have. The 
fatal fallacy of such logic lies in ignoring the radical difference 
between a morally acting mind and either the impulses of brute 
instinct or the course of unintelligent matter. Analogies built 
upon such ignoring prove nothing. The simple question still re- 
turns upon us: Can any mere thing be in itself sinful, t. e. } full of 



PSALM LI. 



219 



sin? If this be true, the staggering question comes back to us: 
Who made it so ? And yet again, How can this be ; for does not 
God himself define sin to be " transgression of law?" (1 John 3: 
4) and say also that "where no law is, there is no transgression?" 
(Rom. 4: 15.) Does not every rebuke of sin that ever fell from 
his lips assume it to be the active agency of a being capable of 
knowing duty and of refusing to do it ? " To him that knoweth to 
do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin?" (James 4: 17). Yet 
again, do the awards of the final judgment pass upon mere tilings 
as sinful and punishable, or rather upon sinfully acting men ? See 
how this is put by Jesus himself (Matt. 25: 31-46), and by Paul 
(Rom. 2: 4-16). Or yet again: Is it supposable that this "sinful 
thing" say the foetus or the infant at birth, can be self-condemned 
in conscience for this supposed sin — that is, for itself— & sinful 
thing — not for what it does but for what it is f Yet this power of 
self-condemnation is beyond question an essential quality in a sin- 
ner. He is such in his very constitution that he is capable of dis- 
cerning moral right from moral wrong and therefore of condemn- 
ing himself for his own morally wrong doing. But how can this 
supposed sinful thing ever have a moral consciousness of responsi- 
ble sin for being what it is at the point of conception or the point 

of birth? These points of argument are put (by necessity) with 

the utmost brevity. They will however, if the reader understands 
them, suffice to show that this construction of David's language 
must be rejected as involving moral absurdities and impossibili- 
ties, as being entirely irreconcilable with the nature of sin as 
known to the human consciousness and as set forth in the word of 
God. 

3. Does David speak of himself as actually sinning at the point of 
conception or of birth ? Does he say in this verse — Behold I was 
born in the act of personal sinning : I was conceived by my mother 

while actually sinning against God ? It would seem scarcely 

necessary to debate this theory of construction, further than to 
put it to any reader — Do you really believe that David could have 
meant to say this ? If so, do you assume that the sin he thought 
of was in any respect like those dreadful sins against Bathsheba, 
against Uriah, against the Hebrew nation, and most of all, against 
God. under the conviction of which his soul is humbled in the 
dust and overwhelmed with the agony of grief and shame ? But 
to suppose that his mind has flitted away to some other kind of sin, 
utterly unlike this is to ignore his whole mental state and to 

assume a practical impossibility. We may therefore safely 

dismiss this theory of construction. 

4. There remains only this supposable construction, viz. : that 
David thinks of himself as of a sinning race, born of sinning 
parents, born with the antecedent temptations and occasions of 
sin (not the efficient and necessitating causes) existing in himself, 
and consequently under circumstances which induced sin at the 
earliest moment possible. This fact is pertinent here, not as an 



220 



PSALM LI. 



extenuation of his guilt, but as suggesting his own moral frailty, 
his danger of falling again before temptation's power, and his 
pressing need — a want that seemed almost crushing — of most 
thorough moral cleansing and of most effective moral succor from 

God's Spirit that he may stand henceforth in purity. In this view 

of it his meaning is fully in harmony with the words that immedi- 
ately follow, as we shall see. In this construction the passage 

classes itself with Job 31 : 18, and Ps. 58 : 3, as evincing a special 
Hebrew idiom or proverbial expression in the sense of doing a 
thing from the earliest practicable moment. Job said — " From my 
youth the fatherless was brought up with me as with a father and 
I have guided her from my mothers vjomb ;" the Psalmist: ''The 
wicked are estranged from the womb ; they go astray as soon as 
they be born, speaking lies." 

6. Behold, thou desirest truth in the inward parts : and 
in the hidden part thou shalt make me to know wisdom. 

"In the inward parts," "in the hidden part," are expressions 
precisely equivalent to our usage of the word heart. God seeks 
an honest, pure, truthful heart. Behold, his approving eye is only 
upon true sincerity. He abhors all hypocrisy. The sincerely 

honest heart he will teach true wisdom. This verse, therefore, 

gives us God's standard of holiness, his ideas of what it really is. 
Consequently the opposite of this is sin. But its opposite is not a 
body of merely sinful matter, but is certain moral states and acts 
of mind, such as insincerity, untruthfulness, dishonesty, false pro- 
fessions of penitence, a false show of reformation. Therefore David 
longs, with irrepressible yearnings, to be made thoroughly pure in 
heart and deeply sincere in his repentance. Oh, might he be lifted 
above all the power of such temptations as those before which he 
has so fearfully fallen ! 

7. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean : wash 
me, and I shall be whiter than snow. 

The Hebrew words for "purge" and for "hyssop" come from 
the sacrificial system, and indicate that moral cleansing from sin 
of which those sacrifices and rites were typical. " Purge " means, 

take sin out of me ; set me free from its presence and power. 

" Hyssop " is the name of a humble shrub of the desert, in constant 
use for the sprinkling of sacrificial blood. See Ex. 12 : 22, and 

Num. 19: 6, 18. The last clause of the verse repeats the thought 

with a strong sense of the beauty and preciousness of the moral 
purity so obtained. 

8. Make me to hear joy and gladness ; that the bones 
which thou hast broken may rejoice. 

Make me hear [from thy lips] words of joy and gladness, that 
the bones, crushed by thy words of terrible rebuke, may again re- 
joice in the manifestations of thy forgiving love. Whatever took 



PSALM LI. 



221 



hold of the soul strongly, deeply, the Hebrews thought and spake 
of as felt in the "bones." 

9. Hide thy face from my sins, and blot out all mine 
iniquities. . 

The two clauses of this verse are essentially parallel, both giving 
the idea of true forgiveness, which is that of overlooking sin, re- 
garding it no longer as demanding punishment, but passing it 
over, " remembering it no more." It amounts therefore to the same 
thing whether the Lord hides his face from sin or blots the sin 
out ; in either case he is thought of as putting the sin away from 
his mind's eye and looking upon the sinner in a sense as if he had 
not sinned. For this the penitent soul of David longed exceed- 
ingly, for it seemed to him unendurable that God should hold his 
sin continually before the eye as if too bad to be forgiven. It is 
refreshing (O who can tell how much so !) that the Infinite Father 
can forgive in this full sense of " hiding his face from our sin and 
blotting out our iniquities !" 

10. Create in me a clean heart, O God; and renew a 
right spirit within me. 

" Create' 1 conveys a strong sense and high appreciation of the 
divine agency, yet without at all implying that this agency is 
physical rather than moral, i. e., such as creates matter rather 
than such as molds mind and moral character. Obviously, since 
spiritual truth must of necessity be expressed largely in terms 
drawn from the material world, we must determine whether this 
influence be physical or moral by our knowledge of that which it 
acts upon and of the effects it produces. Here the parallelism of 
the verse comes to our aid, showing that the thing David prayed 
for was precisely a spirit, a mind, fixed, settled, established, in 
piety. This is the sense of the Hebrew word for "right" — "a 
right spirit." David prayed to be kept steadfast in obedience, as 
opposed to a fickle, changeful mind, easily seduced into sin by 
temptation. 

11. Cast me not away from thy presence ; and take not 
thy Holy Spirit from me. 

To stand in the presence of kings is to enjoy their favor as well 
as to be in readiness to do their bidding. The manifestations of 
God's presence are essentially the same as the expressions of 
his favor and love. Hence David prays here that God would 
not repel him away from his kind regard because of his great 
sin. Let me still live before thee, still walk in thy light, believe 

in and enjoy thy love. The New Testament doctrine that the 

Holy Spirit dwells in the heart of each saint, as God of old dwelt 
in his earthly temple, appears here in its full development. David 
prayed that God would not take this divine Presence from his soul, 
but let it return rather and abide in all its power. How could he 



222 



PSALM LI. 



hope to live a steadfast, holy life without this present Spirit of 
God ever teaching, impressing, quickening. With such views of 
its necessity, we must suppose that this prayer expressed his 
most earnest desire. It implored the blessing which more than 
any other he felt that he must have. 

12. Kestore unto me the joy of thy salvation; and up- 
hold me with thy free Spirit. 

"The joy of thy salvation" — such joy as a conscious sense of 
pardon and that peace with God which is the witness of present 
salvation evermore imparts. This joy had for a long time ceased 
from his heart, while his troubled conscience and his guilty un- 
rest had filled his soul with agony. (See Ps. 32 : 3, 4, and notes 

there). In the last clause our translators have put in the word 

"thy" without authority in the original. The fact that David 
said "thy" in v. 11, " thy Holy Spirit ;" but did not say "thy" 
in v. 10, nor in this verse, nor in v. 17, goes far to show that he 
thinks in all these latter cases of his own spirit and not directly 
of God's Spirit. It is indeed a prayer for God's gracious help; 
but his precise meaning is — Uphold me by quickening in me a 
willing, obedient, loving, and spontaneously acting spirit; i. e., 
help me, 0 Lord, to do right with all my heart and soul, with the 
most spontaneous outgoing of my soul's aspirations and endeavors. 
That is, he is here indicating what he wanted rather than the 
agency by which he hoped to get it. 

13. TJien will I teach transgressors thy ways ; and sin- 
ners shall be converted unto thee. 

Thus restored and thus girded with new spiritual strength, he 
will gladly resume his Christian labor for the good of others. 
Especially will he teach sinners — those who like himself had 
grievously departed from the Lord — what God's ways of mercy 
are ; how freely and how gloriously he can forgive ! Ah, could he 
not testify to this from the depths of a broken heart ! Certainly, 
under the influence of such witnessing testimony, sinners would 
return again to God and find such joys of salvation as those which 

now gladden his soul. The words "sinners shall be converted 

unto thee " might apply either to those who like himself had pre- 
viously known God but had grievously sinned, or to those who had 
never either known God or sought him. Christ spake of Peter as 
" converted" after his great sin (Luke 22: 32). 

14. Deliver me from blood-guiltiness, O God, thou God 
of my salvation : and my tongue shall sing aloud of thy 
righteousness. 

15. O Lord, open thou my lips ; and my mouth shall 
show forth thy praise. 

" Deliver me from blood " is the expressive phrase of the original, 
looking it would seem to the current idea that the blood of the 



PSALM LI. 



223 



murdered man had a voice that cried for vengeance and bore in 
itself a terrible power of retribution upon the guilty murderer. 
(See Gen. 4: 10). God had declared that he would require the 
blood of murder (Gen. 9: 5). And in this very case David could 
not forget those words sent him from God through Nathan : " Be- 
cause thou hast slain Uriah with the sword of the children of 
Ammon, therefore the sword shall never depart from thy house " 
(2 Sam. 12 : 9, 10). Yet David might and did pray that God 
would spare him personally from the doom of the murderer and 

blot out this great sin. Thus forgiven, " my tongue shall sing 

aloud of thy righteousness" — not "righteousness" however in the 

sense of strict justice, but of clemency, goodness. "Open my 

lips" by giving me free pardon, and in this way, abundant occa- 
sion to testify to thy forgiving love ; and then my mouth shall wit- 
ness to thy praise. Loosen my tongue, and it shall indeed speak 
for thee in testimony to thy wondrous grace. 

16. For thou desirest not sacrifice; else would I give it: 
thou delightest not in burnt offering. 

17. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit : a broken 
and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise. 

If the sacrifice of animals even by the thousand could have 
washed away his guilt, or in any way appropriately met his case 
and the demands of infinite justice, how gladly would he have 
made the offering ! But God had taught him better. The sacri- 
fices that God desired and demanded were a broken heart and a 
contrite spirit — a heart humbled, consciously self-smitten for its 
sin, thoroughly contrite, justifying God, and utterly condemning 
himself. Such a state of heart, God would not despise ; could not 
thrust away. 

18. Do good in thy good pleasure unto Zion : build thou 
the walls of Jerusalem. 

19. Then shalt thou be pleased with the sacrifices of 
righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offer- 
ing : then shall they offer bullocks upon thine altar. 

It is refreshing to see David's heart return to its former love for 
Zion and to prayer in her behalf, with a just sense of his royal 
responsibilities. Doubtless he felt that his sins had brought great 
scandal on the name of Israel's God, and spiritual danger upon the 
Zion he had once loved and labored for. But now with a broken 
heart and a sense of pardon from God and of his restored favor, 
it was most pertinent that his prayer should revert again to those 
great interests of national worship and national piety which he, 
alas! had done so much to imperil. Will he not give his spared 
life and his restored soul afresh to the care of the Lord's people, 
and to prayerful sympathy for Jerusalem, the city of his God ? 
God smiling again upon his Zion as well as upon his own long 
burdened and guilty soul, there shall be within her sacred walls 



224 



PSALM LII. 



yet many other acceptable offerings and sacrifices to the honor of 
Israel's God and for the good of his worshiping people. 

This penitential Psalm of David has a wonderful history stretch- 
ing all along down the ages since first the royal penitent wrote 
it in tears, and passed it over to "the chief musician" for the 
public service of the great congregation. It impresses us as one 
of the masterly compensations wrought out in God's wisdom that 
so many thousand hearts have prayed and sought mercy of God 
in the use of these fitting words, and have been lifted out of the 
depths of despair into peaceful hope by the inspiring power of this 
Psalm and of this case of forgiving, restoring mercy. O how 
many stricken hearts have found every feeling anticipated, every 
want of their souls met by these utterances of the royal Psalmist ! 
How the thought and the feeling they could scarcely find words 
to express, have flowed into the channel prepared for them in these 
petitions, and there has been somehow a new sense of the possi- 
bility -of mercy begotten by the fact that these words of one of 
the chief of sinners- did come up with acceptance before God, and 
were placed in his word for the helpful encouragement of all like- 
minded sorrowing souls onward to the end of time. So God is 
wont to bring good out of the evil of sin. 

PSALM LII. 

The caption of this Psalm, " A Psalm of David when Doeg the 
Edomite came and told Saul and said to him, David is come to the 
house of Ahimelech," gives the occasion and subject definitely, 
viz., David's words addressed to Doeg who sought to betray him 
into Saul's power. The history stands in 1 Sam. 21 : 1-9, and 22 : 
9-23, and evinces the bitterest rancor on the part of Saul against 
David, and all who might have done for him even the offices of 
common humanity. In the light of this rancor, we may estimate 
justly the sin of Doeg, since he put himself entirely with Saul in 
all his malignity toward David and those who befriended him. 

1. Why boasteth thou thyself in mischief, O mighty 
man ? the goodness of God endureth continually. 

The exquisite beauty and force of this rebuke lie in the contrast 
drawn between mischief and goodness — between Doeg, proud of 
his wickedness, and God, glorying only in his perpetual benevo- 
lence. How canst thou, O Edomite, think it thy glory to do such 
mischief, when the great God deems it his highest glory to do good? 
Look at his eternal love toward all his creatures, and see in the 
true glory thereof thine own guilt and shame in that thou canst 

boast in thine utter wickedness ! So God's example should stand 

forever, a rebuke to all mischief in act, and to all malignity in 
spirit. The original word for "boast" suggests making a shine, 



PSALM LII. 



225 



showing off for proud display, as if it were his chosen distinction 
upon which he prided himself. O how guilty and how base the 
man who can deem it his proud distinction to be totally unlike 
God; to be as conspicuous and great in malignity as God is in his 

loving-kindness ! Dr. Alexander thinks the address here, " O 

mighty man" is to Saul and not to Doeg. But obviously the cap- 
tion was designed to indicate Doeg rather than Saul. All the 
points made in the Psalm fit the case of Doeg ; so that there is no 
occasion to discredit the authority of the caption. Some com- 
mentators assume that the last clause of v. 1 implies only this : 
All thy efforts for my destruction are futile, for God, my Refuge, 
is forever good. But the words do* not suggest Goa as a refuge 
or David's trust in him. The construction given above is there- 
fore better. 

2. Thy tongue deviseth mischiefs; like a sharp razor, 
working deceitfully. 

3. Thou lovest evil more than good; and lying rather 
than to speak righteousness. Selah. 

Of course, the tongue is here personified as if itself had the 
malicious purpose and the intelligence to plan schemes of mis- 
chief, and power to cut like a razor. In David's view, mischief 
and lies were thoroughly congenial to the heart of Doeg, done 
without repugnance ; loved more than truth and well-doing. Is 
not this real depravity? Well may we pause ["Selah"] and 
dwell on the ineffable meanness and guilt of such a heart ! 

4. Thou lovest all devouring words, O thou deceitful 
tongue. 

5. God shall likewise destroy thee forever, he shall take 
thee away, and pluck thee out of thy dwelling-place, and 
root thee out of the land of the living. Selah. 

"Thou lovest all destructive words," words having the power to 
swallow up and destroy. God also will destroy thee, for ven- 
geance against such wickedness is demanded of the righteous 

God. The verbs in Hebrew are strongly significant, thus: God 

will tear thee down [" destroy "] as men tear down old or worth- 
less buildings; will seize upon thee ["take "] as men take up fire 
from the hearth; he will pluck thee from thy dwelling-place as a 
tree is torn up, and will uproot thee from the land of the living. 
Pause and consider! for who can withstand the mighty God! 

6. The righteous also shall see, and fear, and shall laugh 
at him : 

7. Lo, this is the man that made not God his strength ; 
but trusted in the abundance of his riches, and strengthened 
himself in his wickedness. 

His fall will be so conspicuous and striking that the righteous 
will take note thereof and be quickened to fresh reverence toward 



226 



PSALM LIII. 



the Great Avenger. "Laugh,"' here, as in Ps. 2 : 6, indicates, 

not a malicious exultation, hut a keen sense of the infinite impo- 
tence and folly of such wickedness. We may infer this from what 
they say: "Behold! mark this man who never trusted God, hut 
trusted riches and wickedness instead ! See his fatal end ! So 
shall all thine enemies perish, O God ! (Judg. 5: 31). 

8. But I am like a green olive tree in the house of God : 
I trust in the mercy of God forever and ever. 

9. I will praise thee forever, because thou hast done it : 
and I will wait on thy name ; for it is good before thy 
saints. • 

The green tree is a figure (at once beautiful and expressive) of 
tli at which is pleasant to the sight, useful, thriving, and enduring. 
Tne root of David's strength was finely indicated by locating this 

tree in the house of God. "I trusted," literally I have trusted, 

but implying also the future: I will trust in God's name which 

endures forever. ''I will praise thee forever because thou hast 

wrought''' — achieved — he does not define what, but leaves us to as- 
sume it to be that which I trust him for, viz., my safety and ulti- 
mate success in my life-work — the thing which God virtually 

promised when he called David to the throne of Israel. " I wiil 

wait on thy name in the presence of the saints," making the most 
public manifestations of my grateful and absolute trust in my God. 
This name is infinitely "good" and therefore most worthy of my 
utmost confidence. Thus it appears that the horrible wickedness 
of Doeg could never shake David's confidence in his God. Indeed 
it only made this confidence the more strong and himself the more 
bold in avowing it before all God's people. 

PSALM LIII. 

This Psalm repeats Ps. 14, with slight variations. These were 
comprehensively indicated in the Xotes to Ps. 14. To account for 
this repetition we may reasonably suppose that David rewrote it 
for the purpose of making some of its expressions stronger. The 
Psalm here before us would seem to have been the later version, 
partly because Ps. 14 stands in the first book and Ps. 53 in the 
second — a subsequent compilation ; and partly because in several 
points 'the change from the former to the latter was manifestly 

made for greater strength. In the* caption to this Psalm we 

have the additional words, "Upon Mahalath, MaschiL" "Mas- 
chil" is very common, in the sense, for instruction. The words, 
"Upon Mahalath" occur elsewhere only in the caption of Ps. 88. 
They are explained variously : by Fuerst, of a musical choir ; by 
Gesenius, of a musical instrument; by Alexander, as indicating 
disease, a malady, but with special reference here to the moral 
malady of human depravity, which is the subject of the Psalm. 



PSALM LIII. 



227 



1. The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God. 
Corrupt are they, and have done abominable iniquity: 
there is none that doeth good. 

2. God looked down from heaven upon the children of 
men, to see if there were any that did understand, that did 
seek God. 

3. Every one of them is gone back : they are altogether 
become filthy ; there is none that doeth good, no, not one. 

4. Have the workers of iniquity no knowledge ? who eat 
up mv people as they eat bread : they have not called upon 
God. 

For the general sense of this Psalm the reader may see the 
Xotes on Ps. 14. Only the variations from that Psalm require 

remarks here. In v. 1 we have in Ps. 14, " They have done 

abominable -works ; " but here, " They have done abominable ini- 
quity; ; meaning, they have made their iniquity abominable. 

The use of Elohim as the name of God in place of Jehovah, is 
indicated in the received version which translates Jehovah " Lord," 
and Elohim, " God. - ' 

5. There were they in great fear, where no fear was : 
for God hath scattered the bones of him that encampeth 
against thee : thou hast put them to shame, because God 
hath despised them. 

6. Oh that the salvation of Israel were come out of Zion ! 
When God bringeth back the captivity of his people, Jacob 
shall rejoice, and Israel shall be glad. 

V. 5 is made specially strong here : " They were in great fear 
where there was no real occasion for it, for God hath not only 
slain but scattered abroad the bones of him who hath pitched his 
camp against thee. The earlier Psalm had said: "There were 
they in great fear, for God is in the generation of the righteous." 
This later one takes the bolder position that God has shown him- 
self to be in the midst of his people by scattering the very bones 

of their enemies. And whereas the earlier Psalm had said, 

The wicked have sought to shame the hope of the poor because 
they have made God their refuge, this later one turns the tables 
completely: "Thou" [every righteous man] "dost deem the 
wicked worthy of real shame because God hath despised them." 
God's opinion of the wicked is more than the public sentiment of 
all the universe besides, were it even combined against his. Much 
more is his opinion of the wicked weighty when all the good are 
with him, and also the conscience of every wicked man ! What 
avails it then, if for a small moment, the wicked would fain put 
the righteous to shame? How utterly will they come down when 



223 



PSALM LIV. 



all beings shall be seen and appreciated as they really are, and 
they shall " awake to everlasting contempt," and the universe shall 
know that "God hath despised them ! " 

PSALM LIV. 

The caption of this Psalm is definite as to its occasion and date : 
" To the chief musician on Neginoth, Maschil: A Psalm of David 
when the Ziphims came and said to Saul, "Both not David hide him- 
self with us?" The history shows that the people of Ziph came 
twice to Saul with this information as to David. 1 Sam. 23 : 19, 
and 26: 1. Either of these occasions might have suggested this 
Psalm. In either case the circumstances sufficed to throw David 
back from all human helpers upon his God in prayer and in grate- 
ful trust. Hence he composed this Psalm perhaps at first for his 
own private worship, and after the public service of song was 
established, he placed it in charge of the "Chief Musician ""to be 
sung for public instruction ["Maschil"] with the accompaniment 
of a certain musical instrument [" Xeginoth "]. This name (Xe- 
ginoth) appears in the caption of five other Psalms, viz. : 4, 6, 55, 
67, 76. 

1. Save me, O God, by thy name, and judge me by thy 
strength. 

"By thy name" — according to those qualities of thy character 
which are indicated by thy significant names, especially faithful- 
ness to thy promises [Jehovah], and power to save, [El, the Mighty 

One]. "Judge me by thy strength" — not in the strict sense of 

deciding which is right, my enemies or myself, but of avenging 
and delivering me by thy strength. David's prayer, "save me " 
assumes that the question of right as between himself and his 
enemies is already settled. He now only implores God to execute 
that implied sentence and give him the results of the divine 
acquittal. 

2. Hear my prayer, O God ; give ear to the words of my 
mouth. 

3. For strangers are risen up against me, and oppressors 
seek after my soul: they have not set God before them. 
Selah. 

He gives the reason for this prayer. "Strangers," not in the 
sense of foreigners but of men alien from God. "Oppressors," 

of tyranical, violent spirit. " Seek my soul," i. e., my life. 

They have no fear of God before their eyes; they act as if there 
were no God. Saul had cut himself loose from all sense of obliga- 
tion to obey God and was persecuting David, not to please God 
but to please himself only. "Selah" calls for a moments 



PSALM LV. 



229 



thought upon this remarkable fact. How terrible a fact it was in 
the case of Saul, and is in any other man's case when his spirit 
becomes reckless of God and he plans and labors to execute with 
no regard whatever to the Great God! 

4. Behold, God is mine helper : the Lord is with them 
that uphold my soul. 

5. lie shall reward evil unto mine enemies : cut them 
off in thy truth. 

" Behold," note this; God is my helper, not only ever before me 
and my mind ever realizing his presence and shaping all my life 
according to his supposed will, but consequently present as my 
refuge and deliverer. He is also with all those who befriend me. 
Placing themselves on my side they are also on the side of God 
and he will care for them. This might fitly encourage the little 
band who had cast in their lot with David in these days of his 

persecution before Saul. In v. 5, following the oldest and most 

approved reading, I translate, " The evil" [i. e., which they seek 
to bring upon me] " shall return upon mine enemies ; cut them 
off in thy faithfulness " — to thy promises made to me. David's 
call and anointing for the throne of Israel involved these promises 
of protection and ultimate success. In cases almost innumerable 
David in his sore affliction fell back upon those implied promises 
and thus lived precisely upon his faith in God. 

6. I will freely sacrifice unto thee : I will praise thy 
name, O Lord ; for it is good. 

7. For he hath delivered me out of all trouble: and 
mine eye hath seen his desire upon mine enemies. 

"Freely," in the sense of a 11 free-will offering," technically so 
called, in distinction from those specially prescribed or required 
by some definite vow. I will offer a special sacrifice, spontane- 
ously, in grateful recognition of this delivering mercy. " I will 

praise thy name for it is good;" the qualities of thy character as 
developed every-where and in particular toward me in all thy 
ways — all which are comprised in thy names — are indeed ineffably 

good ; let me therefore praise thy name with all my soul ! 

"Hath delivered " in past times, and I know that he will also in 

the future. " Mine eye hath looked upon mine enemies " — which 

implies that he still survives ; and probably that they have fallen, 
or at least, have lost their power to harm or even alarm him. 
The word in Italics, 11 desire" is not indicated in the Hebrew. 

PSALM LV! 

The caption to this Psalm — " To the chief musician on Neginoth, 
Maschil, a Psalm oi David" — does not locate it in either time or 



230 



PSALM LY. 



occasion. The general scope of the Psalm assumes that the wri- 
ter [David] was in great affliction, severely pressed by enemies, 
and especially by some one who had been ostensibly in most friendly 
relations (vs. 12-14). In these sore trials he turns to God in 
earnest prayer for help; expresses assured confidence that God 
will deliver him, and builds upon his faith and experience the 
broadly comprehensive doctrine that every friend of God may cast 
upon him the disposal of his destiny with no fear as to the final 

result, assured of his sustaining arm (v. 20). The personal 

history of David, as known to us, suggests only the names of Saul 
and Absalom between whom to choose as this enemy, with some 
points in favor of each, but none quite decisive for either. The 
location of this Psalm among others that certainly refer to Saul 
favors the reference of this to him. The moral lessons of the 
Psalm are scarcely affected by the decision of this question. 

1. Give ear to my prayer, O God ; and hide riot thyself 
from my supplication. 

2. Attend unto me, and hear me : I mourn in my com- 
plaint, and make a noise ; 

3. Because of the voice of the enemy, because of the op- 
pression of the wicked : for they cast iniquity upon me, and 
in wrath they hate me. 

"Hide not thyself from my supplications" — the conception be- 
ing that not hearing his cry for help was practically withdrawing 
himself into darkness and leaving the poor suppliant in utter ne- 
glect. "I mourn" — more strictly I wander about, restless and 

troubled in my musings, and I moan — describing the case of one 
deeply distressed, roaming about unconsciously under his load of 

heart-sorrows. "They cast iniquity upon me," in the sense of 

pushing their wicked schemes vigorously for my destruction. 
Literally, they move upon me like the approaches of a besieging 
army, advancing each hour their assailing lines. 

4. My heart is sore pained within me : and the terrors of 
death are fallen upon me. 

5. Fearfulness and trembling are come upon me, and 
horror hath overwhelmed me. 

" My heart is sore pained," literally writhes in its torture. His 
life continually threatened, how could he shut off from his heart 
the terrors of death? For a long time Saul sought David's life 
with his utmost energy and with the resources of his kingdom. 

6. And I said, Oh that I had wings like a dove ! for then 
would I fly away, and be at rest. 

7. Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the 
wilderness. Selah. 



PSALM LV. 



231 



8. I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and 
tempest. 

The history of David's wanderings among the mountain fast- 
nesses of Judah, are a comment on these words. 0 if I only had 
wings, how would I lift myself up from the face of a land that has 
no safe spot for the sole of my foot ; how would I fly away, leav- 
ing no trace of my steps, and dwell, as the timid birds do, in the 
wilderness ! No storms, like these now beating on me, should 

reach me there! "Selah" suggests a pause over a thought so 

bright in anticipation though only ideal. The words are no less 

applicable to David's case when he actually fled the city before 
Absalom and sought safety in the mountains east of the Jordan. 

9. Destroy, O Lord, and divide their tongues: for I have 
seen violence and strife in the city. 

" Divide their tongues ; " distract their counsels, and thus break 
their combined power — an expression borrowed perhaps from the 
confusion of tongues at Babel. "In the city," somewhat probably 
the city of Jerusalem ; yet if the Psalm relates to Saul, this city 
was his capital. If it looks to the scenes of Absalom's revolt, it 
touches most aptly the condition of the great city then. It would 
be specially painful to David that the holy city, the home of the 
nation's worship and of the nation's God, should be the scene of 
such " violence and strife." Their presence in that city moved his 
soul to this prayer that God would distract their counsels and blast 
their schemes. So we read in the history (2 Sam. 15: 31): "I 
pray thee, 0 Lord, turn the counsel of Ahithophel into foolish- 
ness." 

10. Day and night they go about it upon the walls thereof : 
mischief also and sorrow are in the midst of it. 

11. Wickedness is in the midst thereof : deceit and guile 
depart not from her streets. 

Violence and strife are personified and thought of as patrolling 
the city, or ranging at will about its walls, day and night — a state 
of anarchy, a wreck of law and order. The points made in these 
verses correspond historically with the revolt of Absalom when 
treason lifted its defiant head, and, for the time, the old authorities 
were powerless in Jerusalem. 

12. For it ivas not an enemy that reproached me ; then 
I could have borne it : neither was it he that hated me that 
did magnify himself against me ; then I would have hid 
myself from him: 

13. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and 
mine acquaintance. 

14. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto 
the house of God in company. 



232 



PSALM LV. 



In this Psalm David's personal enemies are spoken of as mora 
than one: see v. 3, "they cast iniquity upon me," and v. 15, 
"Upon them" and v. 19, "God shall afflict them." But here some 
one is made specially prominent — one who had been esteemed a 
friend, and indeed a very intimate and confidential friend. We 
may, perhaps, suppose this friend to have been Ahithophel, in 
whom David must have had the utmost confidence, and whose 
treachery sent a pang of bitterest grief to his heart. The history 
shows that Ahithophel had been one of David's most confidential 
and trusted counselors, but that in this rebellion his plans con- 
templated nothing short of David's utter ruin — the reckless outrage 
of his domestic rights and relations, and the absolute committal 
of this rebellion to victory or death. Nothing could have been 
more bitter to David's heart than this astounding defection of his 
old friend, this apparently sudden transformation of his bosom 

counselor into a most malign and desperate foe. " A man 

mine equal " — of like rank and estimation with myself, whom I 
had taken to my heart as a brother and into my confidence as ono 
who could never prove false to me. And to crown all, we had 
been in the closest intimacy in our religious sympathies ; we had 
walked to God's house in company; there we had sought God's 
counsel in our straits and his blessing on our plans and endeavors. 
There our friendship had been sanctified and sealed before the 
mercy-seat and under the eye of Israel's God. Is not such treach- 
ery the keenest torture ? Alas, how does it shake all confidence 
in fallen mortals ! 

15. Let death seize upon them, and let them go down 
quick into hell : for wickedness is in their dwellings, and 
among them. 

I would translate: "Destructions are upon them ! They shall go 
down alive to the grave, for wickedness is in their dwellings, yea, 
in their hearts." This translation of the first two words follows 
the oldest authorities rather than the masoretic marginal reading 
which has governed the received English version. Most of the 
modern critics accept the authority of the consonants as written 
in the text rather than the proposed corrections indicated in the 

Hebrew margin. The original words do not demand a prayer 

here, but express only a prediction — the confident assurance that 
ruin must suddenly overtake such outrageous wickedness. It is 
remarkable that both Ahithophel and Absalom met their death — 
in time, soon, and in manner, terribly. The one, in disappoint- 
ment and chagrin, hung himself; the other, caught by the proud 
hair of his head, while yet the battle raged in the wood of 
Ephraim, was left unhorsed and dangling till the darts of Joab 
pierced him fatally, and his fall put an end at once to this battle 
and to this rebellion. Thus they went down living to their graves — 
the phrase being taken, it would seem from the case of Korah and 
his company, swallowed alive by the opening jaws of the earth be- 



PSALM LV. 



233 



neath their feet. (Num. 16.) The word "quick" is, in the old 
sense, living — the meaning of the Hebrew word here used, .and 
not in the modern sense soon. 

16. As for me, I will call upon God ; and the Lord 
shall save me. 

17. Evening, and morning, and at noon, will I pray, 
and cry aloud : and he shall hear my voice. 

"As for me" well indicates the strong contrast which David 
designedly puts between his case and that of his enemies. 
They, prayerless and awfully wicked, go down suddenly and fear- 
fully to their own place ; but I cry to my God for help, and in 

him I find precious salvation. This allusion to David's stated 

times for prayer is interesting as showing that he lived in the at- 
mosphere of prayer, waiting continually upon his God at all times, 

and pre-eminently in all his straits. The word rendered pray 

[" I will pray "] has the primary sense of muse, meditate ; and 
must certainly be understood to include serious meditation as op- 
posed to merely unthinking and formal prayer. The last clause 

should read : " And then he heard my voice." It states the historic 
fact that in those days of sorest trial when he sought the Lord so 
earnestly and with such continuous prayer, the Lord met his re- 
quest most promptly with the desired salvation. 

18. He hath delivered my soul in peace from the battle 
that was against me : for there were many with me. 

From the battle waged against me, he hath redeemed me into 
peace and prosperity again — a fact the more worthy of notice be- 
cause the people arrayed against me were many. The last clause 
plainly means, not that his own party were many, but that the 
many were, as we might say, fighting with him, i. e., in conflict 
against him. The logic of the passage demands this construction ; 
and the Hebrew words readily admit it. 

19. God shall hear, and afflict them, even he that abideth 
of old. Selah. Because they have no changes, therefore 
they fear not God. 

The verb translated "afflict" usually means to answer, and in 
this close connection with "hear" should be so taken. God will 
hear and answer them [i. e., as their wicked prayer deserves]. 
" He that abideth of old" is not merely he who liveth of old, but 
he who sits enthroned of old, from everlasting, the Eternal King. 
— — •" Selah ; " think of this : He who has reigned through all the | 
ages of the eternal Past, will not he subdue the wicked beneath 
his feet? Then continuing the construction without pause, we 
may translate : " God will hear and answer them to whom there 
are no changes and who fear not God." The word for " changes " 
might possibly refer to inward, moral changes; but its current 
usage as well as the logic of this passage strongly favor its refer- 



234 



PSALM LV. 



ence to physical changes of condition, e. g., calamities, reverses. 
God will hear and answer [in righteous justice] those who, long 
prosperous, have been hardened in iniquity, past all wholesome 
fear of his name. 

20. He hath put forth his hands against such as be at 
peace with him : he hath broken his covenant. 

21. The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, 
but war ivas in his heart : his words were softer than oil, 
yet were they drawn swords. 

This continues the description of David's wicked enemy. He 
turned against his trusting friends; his words were false and his 
heart foul. 

22. Cast thy burden upon the Loed, and he shall sus- 
tain thee: he shall never suffer the righteous to be moved. 

The word for "burden" may be either a noun in the sense thy 
destined lot or portion as assigned to thee by God in his provi- 
dence ; or a verb to be translated, what he gives thee, i. e., to 
bear; the sense of the passage being essentially the same in either 

construction. The Avord " sustain " well expresses the sense of 

the Hebrew which, though sometimes used for support and nour- 
ishment by food, yet readily admits the wider sense, uphold, sus- 
tain, i. e.., to bear the lot of care, labor, or suffering which God 
may appoint. The passage is essentially reproduced by Peter 
(1 Eps. 5 : 7) : " Casting all your care upon him for he careth for 
you.' Of kindred sentiment is Ps. 37 : 5 : " Commit thy way un- 
to the Lord; trust also in him, and he shall bring it to pass." 

No words can adequately express the richness and preciousness 
of these promises in their practical relations to the cares and bur- 
dens of every-day life. Every heart has its burdens ; every heart 
knoweth its own as none else save God can know them. But this 
broad promise proffers all needful help under every burden. 
"What help can possibly be more effective and sufficient ? Whose 
arm is stronger to sustain than his ? Whose sympathy can be so 

precious? It is both pleasant and instructive to think what 

these words meant as they fell from the lips of David. " My bur- 
den," he would say, " was that of an exile driven from his throne, 
from his home, and wives and children, and more than all, from 
the altar and sanctuary of my God. I feared fbr my life ; I feared 
for the welfare of my kingdom and my people ; the griefs of a 
father's heart were embittered by the murderous treason of a son, 1 
• by the treachery of my dearest counselor and friend, and finally' 
by the agony of seeing that son die almost before my eyes, my 
aching heart crying out : 1 Would God I had died for thee, O Ab- 
salom, my son, my son ! ' These were the burdens God gave me 
to bear ; but he gave me also this sweet and restoring promise : 
'Cast thy burden upon the Lord, and he will sustain thee : he will 
never suffer the righteous to be moved.' Let the people of God, 



PSALM LVI. 



235 



all down through the ages read in my case the fullness and glory 
of this promise! " 

23. But thou, O God, shalt bring them down into the 
pit of destruction : bloody and deceitful men shall not live 
out half their days ; but I will trust in thee. 

So surely and terribly must the wicked perish ! Men of blood 
and deceit do not halve their days [so the Hebrew] ; their sun 

sinks before it has reached the meridian! But as for me, I will 

trust in thee to bear me safely through every peril down to the 
fullness and ripeness of human years. 

PSALM LVI. 

Several points are made in the caption. " To the chief musi- 
cian on Jonath-elem-rechokim ; Michtam of David, when the Phil- 
istines took him in Gath." The historic occasion "when the 

Philistines seized him in Gath" is rather inferable from 1 Sam. 
21 : 10-12, than definitely stated there." Those Philistine servants of 
Achish were manifestly very suspicious of David, and we may sup- 
pose, seized him rudely if not even violently, and brought him before 
their master. This treatment seem to have suggested the Psalm. 

For the word "Michtam" which occurs only in Ps. 16, and 

56-60, see notes on the caption to Ps. 16. The Hebrew words, 

Jonath-elem-rechokim, are obscure, and of course are interpreted 
by the best critics variously, by Maurer, as referring to the musi- 
cal instrument used ; by Gesenius and Fuerst, as the first words 
of some other song which indicates the tune for this or the man- 
ner of performance — the significance of the words being accord- 
ing to the former, "The silent dove among strangers" or exiles; 
according to the latter, " The dove of God from the far sea." 
Others, [e. g. Alexander] take the words as significant of the feel- 
ing and experience of the writer; the "dove" denotes innocence; 
" dumb " or silent, as destined to bear with none hearing nor even 
himself uttering his grievances ; and among strangers or exiles, 

far away from his home and people. The word "upon" ["to 

the chief musician upon "] favors the view of Gesenius. The 
men of the age of David and Solomon, familiar with the temple 
music, might readily understand it. But after that familiar 
knowledge had passed away, only the significance of the words 
themselves would remain to guide the reader to their meaning 

here. The scope of the Psalm is obvious, setting forth his 

affliction, his prayerful trust in God for help, and his grateful 
thanksgiving for help obtained. 

1. Be merciful unto me, O God : for man would swallow 
me up ; he fighting daily oppresseth me. 



236 



PSALM LVI. 



2. Mine enemies would daily swallow me up : for they he 
many that fight against me, O thou Most High. 

"Be merciful" — a cry for help from God against hostile and 
powerful men. " Swallow me up," conceives of these enemies as 
savage beasts, coming down upon him with open jaws, panting in- 
cessantly to devour. The word translated, "0 thou Most High " 

is commonly an adverb meaning proudly, as from a higher posi- 
tion and with superior claims. In this sense it would" here de- 
scribe the spirit of their fighting against him. Hebrew usage does 
not sustain our translators in taking it as a name of God. 

3. What time I am afraid, I will trust in thee. 
Literally, "the day I shall fear I will put my trust in thee." 

As they pant eagerly for my life all the day or every day, so will I, 
through every such day of danger, find my refuge and hope in 
thee. This is putting his faith in God to practical, every-day 
use. 

4. In God I will praise his word, in God I have put my 
trust ; I will not fear what flesh can do unto me. 

"The words "In God," repeated here, give a striking promin- 
ence to his precious relations to his God. We might translate : 
" In God will I exult, even in his word [of promise] ; in God have 
I put my only trust ; I will not fear ; what can flesh [the weak 
arm of mortal man] do against me while God is on my side ? " This 
pause after "fear," and this interrogative construction of the last 
words are plainly indicated in the original and heighten the force 
and beauty of the passage. 

5. Every day they wrest my words : all their thoughts 
are against me for evil. 

6. They gather themselves together, they hide themselves, 
they mark my steps, when they wait for my soul. 

"Thoughts" in the sense of artful schemes, plans, devices 
against his life. In the last clause of v. 6, the tense of the verb 
requires this: "They will waylay my steps ['heels'], even as 
they have lain in wait for my life." They will continue to do as 
they have committed themselves and have done before. There- 
fore I have nothing better or else to expect from them than per- 
petual endeavors to destroy me. 

7. Shall they escape by iniquity? in thine anger cast 
down the people, O God. 

In the first clause there being nothing in the text to indicate a 
question, it is better to translate affirmatively : " Upon iniquity is 
their escape ;" meaning either that such has been the fact or that 
such is their expectation, or yet more probably, both ideas are in- 
volved thus : Because they have thus far escaped justice by means 
of consummate iniquity, therefore they hope to do so in the future. 



PSALM LVII. 



237 



Upon this rests David's prayer — " In wrath cast down the wicked 
people, O God." How canst thou endure it that they should per- 
petrate such wickedness and then escape justice by still other 
schemes of iniquity ? 

8. Thou tellest my wanderings : put thou my tears into 
thy bottle : are they not in thy book ? 

" Thou tellest " — by record in a book; literally, thou dost book 
them. So also bottle thou my tears, for a permanent record, to 
keep them ever before thine eye. Is it not even so ? Precious 
thought — that the Great Father lets no tear of his child escape 
his notice or fail from his memory ! 

9. When I cry unto thee, then shall mine enemies turn 
back : this I know ; for God is for me. 

"Turn back," not of their own will and motion, but under 
God's resistless hand. They shall be turned back, despite their 
malign hostility. I know this because God is with me, on my 
side, and mightier than the mightiest of my foes. 

10. In God will I praise his word : in the Lord will I 
praise his word. 

11. In God have I put my trust: I will not be afraid 
what man can do unto me. 

This essentially repeats the sentiment of v. 4. Trusting in God, 
I will praise his word [of promise] ; i. e., will praise him for that 
word. I will celebrate the love and faithfulness of those promises, 
and of their ever-glorious Author. See notes on v. 4. 

12. Thy vows are upon me, O God : I will render praises 
unto thee. 

13. For thou hast delivered my soul from death : wilt not 
thou deliver my feet from falling, that I may walk before 
God in the light of the living ? 

In his distress he had made vows to his God. Having now 
found deliverance, he is holden to repay those vows ; they are upon 
him and hold him in the bonds of gratitude and love for their 
payment in full. The Mosaic law provided for such cases by pre- 
scribing appropriate festal sacrifices. Since in passing through 

these special perils God had delivered him from death, he now 
prays that in like manner henceforth God would shield him from 
whatever perils may await him. 

PSALM LVII. 

The caption here indicates both the author and the occasion : 
"To the chief musician, Al-taschith; Michtam of David, when he 
11 



238 



PSALM LVIL 



fled from Saul in the cave." The history (1 Sam. 22: 1, and 
24: 1) recites some of David's experiences when secreting him- 
self from Saul in caves. The passages, 1 Sam. 23 : 14, 29, and 
24 : 2, 3, speak of his " abiding in strongholds in the fastnesses of 
the hills of Judah." If the caption alludes to any one specific 
point, the history is too brief and general to enable us to locate 

it. " Al-taschith " [destroy not] appears in the caption of three 

connected Psalms (57-59), and of Ps. 75. The words occur in 
the report given by Moses of his prayer of intercession for his 
people (Deut. 9: 26). David himself said of Saul to Abishai 
(1 Sam. 26: 9): " Destroy him not." The Chaldeeparaphrast sug- 
gests that the Psalms which bear this title belong to that period 
of David's history when he was under the perpetual necessity of 
saying, "destroy not," and are therefore suited to all similar emer- 
gencies of other saints. (Alexander.) May the Lord spare his 
suppliant people, seems to be the spirit of the song. 

1. Be merciful unto me, O God, be merciful unto me : 
for my soul trusteth in thee : yea, in the shadow of thy 
wings will I make my refuge, until these calamities be over- 
past. 

The strain is remarkably similar to that of the two preceding 
Psalms — prayer and trust for deliverance from the murderous de- 
signs of Saul. " Under the shadow of thy wings" — as in the hour 
of danger the young nestle under the wing of the mother bird. 
So may God's people always find a refuge, safe and sweet, under 
his protecting wing. 

2. I will cry uuto God most high ; unto God that per- 
formeth all things for me. 

3. He shall send from heaven, and save me from the re- 
proach of him that would swallow me up. Selah. God 
shall send forth his mercy and his truth. 

It was his joy that his God was truly Most High — mighty in all 
power; able to accomplish whatever he pleased in behalf of his 

trustful servants. In v. 3, the clause translated "from the 

reproach of him that would swallow me up," may be read, either, 
Will save me whom my enemy scorns, or, He (God) will scorn 
my enemy. The enemy is described by the same word as in Ps. 

56 : 1,2; one who pants with open mouth to swallow him down. 

"God will send forth from heaven his mercy and his truth" — is 
bold personification, as if mercy and truth were the very messen- 
gers of his power, the mighty agents, angels of deliverance to his 
imperiled servants. 

4. My soul is among lions : and I lie even among them 
that are set on fire, even the sons of men, whose teeth are 
spears and arrows, and their tongue a sharp sword. 



PSALM LVII. 



239 



"My soul," in the sense of life, is in a den of lions. At best, I 
make my bed among men on fire with rage, their teeth and tongue 
weapons of war for my destruction. This prominence given to 
slander in the effort of Saul to destroy David, was due to the fact 
that David had, to a great extent, the hearts of the people, with 
right and justice, on his side, and therefore Saul must needs tra- 
duce and slander his fair name, else the people would not let him 
destroy David. 

5. Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens ; let thy 
glory be above all the earth. 

Exalt thyself, O thou mighty God, as the friend of the suffering 
and the righteous — as my Friend in this emergency. Let thy 
glory as the righteous God be displayed over all the earth in my 
deliverance ! 

6. They have prepared a net for my steps ; my soul is 
bowed down : they have digged a pit before me. into the 
midst whereof they are fallen themselves. Selah. 

In the second clause, the more facile reading is : They bow or 
press my soul down into it ; they press me into the net spread for 
me. Then suddenly a new turn is given to the thought: They fall 
into the very pit which they have dug for my life. Over this let 
the reader pause to think of God's righteous retributions ! 

7. My heart is fixed, O God, my heart is fixed : I will 
sing and give praise. 

8. Awake up, my glory; awake, psaltery and harp: I 
myself will awake early. 

In view of such manifestations of God's love and faithfulness 
to me and of his righteous justice toward my implacable enemies, 
my heart is fixed, fully purposed and established ; I will love thee, 

trust thee, and praise thee with my utmost powers! Awake, 

my soul, to grateful song ; let every power of my being conspire 
to render praise to my Infinite Friend and Deliverer! Let harp 
and lute pour forth their sweetest strains ; let me awake the daion 
with songs. "Awaken the dawn of morning" is precisely the 
sense of the original words, and is beautiful poetry. 

9. I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people : I will 
sing unto thee among the nations. 

10. For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy 
truth unto the clouds. 

11. Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens: let 
thy glory be above all the earth. 

"Among the people, among the nations," seems to mean, in their 
presence, before them all, to make the glory of his God known 
to the very ends of the earth. Far is he from being ashamed to 



240 



PSALM LVIII. 



testify for Israel's God. It is in his heart to let all the people of 
the wide world know how faithful and true is his God, and how 

rich in mercy to all who call upon him. To say "mercy and 

truth are great even to the heavens, reaching unto the clouds" — 
labors to set forth the exceeding greatness and excellent glory of 
these moral qualities. How simple the conception, yet how sub- 
lime ! Thus, in the highest strain of poetic beauty, and with 

imagery magnificently grand, does the Psalmist give the testimony 
of his grateful heart to the mercy and the power shown him of 
God in his deliverance from his enemies, and in his final triumph 
in reaching the throne of Israel. 

PSALM LVIII. 

The caption to this Psalm corresponds to that of Ps. 57, and of 
Ps. 59, omitting only the allusions which they severally contain to 
the specific circumstances which occasioned their composition. 
The location of this between those two and this correspondence 
in caption, go far to prove that this was regarded by the compilers 
as in the same class with those, an outgrowth of his persecutions 
from Saul and particularly leveled against the perversions of jus- 
tice in the high places of power under which David suffered. 
The Psalm opens with rebuke of this sin; proceeds to describe 
the enormity and malignity of human wickedness, and to pray that 
God would frustrate their wicked schemes with judgments so fear- 
ful as to assure the righteous that there is a God above who will 
award good to the righteous but vengeance to the wicked. 

1. Do ye indeed speak righteousness, 0 congregation ? 
do ye judge uprightly, O ye sons of men? 

In this verse the Hebrew reader will have more difficulty than 
the English. If we might take "congregation" to mean a judi- 
cial assembly, bearing the responsibility of administering justice 
(if the Hebrews had any such), we should have a facile sense in 
the verse. But the Hebrew as it now stands has no word for 
" congregation," but has a word which usually means dumbness, 
mute silence* How to dispose of this word is with the critics the 
great question. Will ye now truly decree justice, long time dumb, 

as if with no voice to speak ? Will ye, long guilty of silence, at 

length give justice a voice through your righteous decisions ? Or, 
aj-e ye indeed dumb when ye should speak righteousness and judge 
equitably ? We get a good sense by any one of these slightly dif- 
ferent constructions, but we can not say that any one of them is 
an easy and natural translation of the Hebrew words. I strongly 
suspect some error in the text, probably the creeping in of this 



PSALM LVIII. 



241 



word, dumbness — the more probable because the Septuagint has 
nothing whatever to express this idea. Happily the ultimate sense 
is clear — a rebuke of those official judges who withheld righteous 
decisions. 

2. Yea, in heart ye work wickedness ; ye weigh the vio- 
lence of your hands in the earth. 

So far from sustaining justice and right, they wrought wicked- 
ness, and this with the heart, through sympathy with wrong, 

" with a will" as we say. The word "weigh" conceives of 

ideal scales of justice in which the even balancing of evidence 
should bring out the truth and the right, but which in their hand 
and with their heart, are perverted to minister to wrongful vio- 
lence, and this "in the earth," i. e., in the land of God's covenant, 
the land of promise to his obedient people. How could the Lord 
endure that the courts of justice should themselves perpetrate mon- 
strous iniquity in his own land ! The fact gives the Psalmist a 
painfully keen sense of the terrible depravity of human hearts, 
as we see in the next verse. 

3. The wicked are estranged from the womb : they go 
astray as soon as they be born, speaking lies. 

This is saying in a very strong way that the race take to sin- 
ning as early as they can, and sin with their whole heart in it. 
The last words of the verse, " speaking lies," fortunately guard us 
against imputing to David or to the inditing Spirit the idea that 
infants do in fact begin to sin from their very birth. Nothing in 
this passage justifies us in assuming that there is sin where there 
is no evidence of thought, of knowledge of God and duty, or of 
voluntary moral choice. 

4. Their poison is like the poison of a serpent : they are 
like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear; 

5. Which Avill not hearken to the voice of charmers, 
charming never so wisely. 

The poison or virus of wickedness in man may be compared 
with the poison of the serpent in the points of its power of mis- 
chief and of its terrible malignity, yet with no assumption of 
moral quality in the serpent. The comparison can not "go on 
all fours." We need not suppose that in David's view man's poi- 
son of depravity runs in his blood — belongs to his physical na- 
ture in precisely the same sense as in the serpent's. David has 
not said, that he puts the wicked man and the poisonous serpent 
on precisely the same footing in the particular points of blame- 
worthiness or of propagation to their respective posterity of the 

qualities that are compared. The meaning of the verse seems 

to be that the wicked judge stops his ear from hearing the evi- 
dence of truth and justice, even as the deaf adder whom no human 
skill can charm into a harmless mood just because she has no ear 



242 



PSALM LVIII. 



to hear those charming incantations. Some serpents can be 
charmed so as not to bite, but the deaf adder can not be, for the 

charm is addressed to the ear. " Charming never so wisely " 

translates a single word, meaning well-skilled. 

6. Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth : break out 
the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord. 

In the case of serpents that can not be charmed, the only alter- 
native is this : break in their teeth ; or changing the figure slightly, 
root out the teeth of the young lion ; and this he prays God to do 
with these wicked men. When their malignity is so terrible and 
their power to harm so great, it only remains to cry to the great 
and just God to knock in their poisonous fangs, or wrench out 
their terribly sharp and strong incisors and make those lion-jaws 

harmless. The word for "young lion" suggests, not the infant 

cub, but the full-grown, yet one not old but in the full vigor of 
youth. 

7. Let them melt away as waters which run continually : 
ivhen, he bendeth his bow to shoot his arrows, let them be as 
cut in pieces. 

New figures illustrate the same idea — the waning power of the 
wicked. Let their resources for mischief grow rapidly less, as 
waters that spread out over desert sands soon melt away and dis- 
appear. When he " treads his arrows," i. e. treads his bow in 
preparation for shooting arrows, let it be as if his arrows were 
pointless — the heads cut off. 

8. As a snail which melteth, let every one of them pass 
away : like the untimely birth of a woman, that they may 
not see the sun. 

Let his march be like the snail's crawl — the point of the figure 
being however, not speed, but the melting away of substance and 
power ; — according to the current notion that the snail used him- 
self up by locomotion, perhaps depositing the slime of his body in 
such quantities as to exhaust the body itself. So let the wicked 

man move — only to exhaust his power the more at every step. 

Also let them be as if they had never been — utterly powerless to 
affect human welfare. 

9. Before your pots can feel the thorns, he shall take 
them away as with a whirlwind, both living, and in his 
wrath. 

Here we must think of cooking done in the open air, and the 
pots heated with the thorn-bush for fuel. Sudden gusts of wind 
sw r eep the fuel away before any heat is felt. So let the concoct- 
ing of wicked schemes be suddenly blasted by the breath of the 

Almighty! Bef#re your pot shall feel the heat of the thorn-fire, 

let him [God] sweep the fuel, gveen or dry, away with his whirl- 



PSALM LIX. 



243 



wind. So the last clause, translated " both living and in his 
wrath," may mean. Or, with Alexander, we may refer these 
words to the flesh within the pot — whether raw or cooked, and 
suppose the sense to be that the whirlwind sweeps away both pot 
and fuel whether the cooking has been done or not. The former 
construction seems more natural, because the disaster takes place 
before the pot. begins to feel the heat of the thorn-fire. God's 
terrible hand is here, wielding the whirlwind of his fury in venge- 
ance upon the guilty schemes of the wicked. 

10. The righteous shall rejoice when lie seeth the venge- 
ance : he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked. 

11. So that a man shall say, Verily tliere is a reward for 
the righteous : verily he is a God that judgeth in the earth. 

These manifestations of God's righteous retribution will be so 
clear that the righteous can not mistake his hand or his heart 
either. They will rejoice most assuredly, and most righteously 
too — for ought they not to sympathize with righteousness, to mourn 
over abounding and mischievous wickedness, and be glad when 
God puts forth his strong arm to suppress it? Indeed they will 
have occasion to say, " Of a truth, there is a God ! Most cer- 
tainly he will reward the righteous " — the suffering and oppressed 
ones who stand with him in right doing and in the love of right- 
eousness. In his own time he will judge the earth and bring the 
wicked to an exemplary and righteous doom ! 

PSALM LIX. 

This is the last of the three Psalms distinguished by tl Al- 
taschith " [destroy not]. Its special occasion appears in the 
words — " When Saul sent and they watched the house to kill 
him." The reader may see the account in full, 1 Sam. 19 : 11-17. 
Appropriately the Psalmist cries to God for deliverance from such 
enemies; speaks of his own innoeence; descants upon their 
wickedness, and repeatedly expresses his assured hope in God for 
the protection which he implores. 

1. Deliver me from mine enemies, O my God: defend 
me from them that rise up against me. 

2. Deliver me from the /workers of iniquity, and save me 
from bloody men. 

"Defend me," literally, set me on high, takes its form of expres- 
sion from the modes of defensive warfare in which men sought 
safety in high towers or upon mountain-tops, out of the reach of 
missile weapons. Their wickedness in seeking his life became his 
plea for God's interposition— a plea which God could not fail to 
hear. 



244 



PSALM LIX, 



3. For, lo, they lie in wait for my soul : the mighty are 
gathered against me; not for my transgression, nor for my 
sin, O Lord. 

4. They run and prepare themselves without my fault : 
awake to help me, and behold. 

"For my soul" — in the usual sense of life. They gather 
together against me — mighty men. On the human side they are too 
strong for me. Therefore, let thy stronger arm be lifted for my 

succor. Happily for David, he was fully conscious that as 

between himself and Saul, this persecution was in no respect for 
his fault. He had not sought the throne ; was no traitor to his 
king or his country; and in those military exploits which had 
aroused Saul's mean jealousy, he had only played the man for his 
country and for his God. Hence it was in no spirit of presump- 
tion that he cast himself absolutely upon God for help. 

5. Thou therefore, O Lord God of hosts, the God of 
Israel, awake to visit all the heathen : be not merciful to 
any wicked transgressors. Selah. 

This repetition of the divine names is expressive and pertinent : 
Jehovah, Elohim, God of the celestial armies and especially of 
Israel; every element of his character and every aspect of his 
relations signified in these words combine to inspire confidence and 
hope in this prayer that God would visit all the wicked nations 
who were in league against him and his people. This allusion to 
"all the heathen" suggests that the Psalm was written after David 
reached the throne, at a point when the circle of his personal ene- 
mies, once restricted to Saul and his minions, was enlarged to 
include many contiguous nations. 

6. They return at evening : they make a noise like a dog, 
and go round about the city. 

These verbs are either future or imperative: " Let them return," 
or, " they shall return ; " better the former. He thinks of the 
Oriental, undomesticated dogs who infest the cities in vast num- 
bers, roaming abroad by day for a meager subsistence, and throng- 
ing outside the city walls at night, howling hideously. So let 
those wicked men who prowl about my dwelling to waylay and 
murder me, find themselves shut out of the city in the darkness of 
night to howl like homeless dogs. 

7. Behold, they belch out with, their mouth: swords are 
in their lips : for who, say they, doth hear? 

The Hebrew word for "belch out" suggests that wickedness in 
their hearts is a gushing spring of which the mouth is the outlet, 

and the floods are forced out under high pressure. "Swords in 

their lips" refers to the cruel causeless calumnies by which they 
traduced and belied David and sought his ruin. They knew that 



PSALM LIX. 



215 



so long as the people believed him not only innocent but eminently 
meritorious, it were vain if not even perilous to themselves to seek 

his life. " For who is hearing ? " the only words found in the 

original, may be said by David and not by his enemies. So taken, 
they express perhaps his first feeling in the case, viz. : that for a 
time God seemed not to take cognizance of their wrong doing. 
But many commentators favor the sense given in the received 
version. 

8. But thou, O Lord, shalt laugh, at them ; thou shalt 
have all the heathen in derision. 

To the great God, the opposition of the mightiest of mortals 
must seem infinitely puny — Avorthy only of supreme contempt. 
See Psalm 2 : 4. 

9. Because of his strength will I wait upon thee : for God 
is my defense. 

10. The God of my mercy shall prevent me : God shall 
let me see my desire upon mine enemies. 

Because of whose strength? is the first and main question here. 
To say with some — that of his enemy, involves two difficulties, viz. : 
that precisely at this point he represents that strength as infinites- 
imally small, deserving only the derisive contempt of the Almighty, 
and also that throughout this Psalm his enemies are not one as 

here but many. It seems better therefore to assume a reference 

to God's strength — the change of person from the third to the 
second being too common in Hebrew to occasion the least diffi- 
culty. His (God's) strength being such as I have just implied, I 
will wait upon thee (O my God); "I will watch towards thee" 
keeping my eye of faith steadfastly fixed on thee alone — this being 

the sense of the verb here used. " Shall prevent me," in the 

old sense of prevent, i. e., anticipate; come in for my help in 
advance of my enemy, ready for my perfect protection. 

11. Slay them not, lest my people forget : scatter them 
by thy power ; and bring them down, O Lord our shield. 

12. For the sin of their mouth and the words of their 
lips let them even be taken in their pride : and for cursing 
and lying which they speak. 

" Slay them not, but scatter them," seems to mean : Do not an- 
nihilate them, lest thy people, only too fully relieved from all ene- 
mies, should forget their God, their Strength and Refuge. Scatter 
them abroad into other lands where their doom may be a perpetual 
lesson upon God's ways of righteous providence. Such, in fact, 
have been God's ways with his covenant people when apostate. 

13. Consume them in wrath, consume them, that they 
may not be: and let them know that God ruleth in Jacob 
unto the ends of the earth. Selah. 



246 



PSALM LX. 



It is not by any means clear how this verse is to be reconciled 
with v. 11 — the negative there with the affirmative here ; the prayer, 
"Slay them not," there, with the prayer, " Consume them utterly," 
which seems to be the meaning of the passage here. It would 
seem that the parties thought of can not be identically the same, 
but are in the latter case a more limited number — the incorrigible 

for whom no mercy can avail. " Let them — men in general — 

(not the people destroyed) know that the God who ruleth in Jacob 
bears sway to the very ends of the earth. 

14. And at evening let them return ; and let them make 
a noise like a dog, and go round about the city. 

15. Let them wander up and down for meat, and grudge 
if they be not satisfied. 

The words of v. 14 become the refrain of this Psalm, to which 
is added here : Let them roam all abroad for food, and if not satis- 
fied, let them remain all the night — i. e., hungry. 

16. But I will sing of thy power ; yea, I will sing aloud 
of thy mercy in the morniug : for thou hast been my de- 
fense and refuge in the day of my trouble. 

17. Unto thee, O my strength, will I siug : for God is 
my defense, and the God of my mercy. 

"Will sing aloud of thy mercy in the morning" — with allusion, 
probably, to his safety ere the morning dawned, for while his ene- 
mies were waiting for the early morning to seize him then, he 
was gone and was safe. It was by human stratagem that he made 
his escape, but, noticeably, he gives to God all the praise. God's 
hand only comes to his thought as having been the means of his 
salvation; God's loving-kindness exclusively as deserving all the 
glory. 

oo^c 

PSALM LX. 

The caption of this Psalm reads : " To the chief Musician upon 
Shushan-eduth, Michtam of David, to teach; when he strove with 
Aram-naharaim and with Aram-zobah, when Joab returned, and 

smote of Edom in the valley of salt twelve thousand." The 

words, "Upon Shushan-eduth," raise the usual question whether 
this is the name of a musical instrument to be used in its 
performance ; or, are the first words of some well known song 
which would suggest the music for this; or, are here for the 
suggestions which their proper meaning — The lily of the testimony — 
would bring to the mind. The latter seems most probable. The 
lily [Shushan] is the symbol of purity, humility, and beauty; 
while "eduth" [testimony] is used of the written law of God 
(Ps. 19: 7), or portions thereof (Deut. 31: 19), as conveying 



PSALM LX. 



247 



God's testimony respecting himself and his law given to men. Ifc 
is only the word "upon," indicating the relation of these words in 
the sentence, that favors either of the first two suppositions. 
Some obscurity hangs over this and similar expressions that appear 

in the captions of many Psalms. "To teach," shows that -the 

Psalm was intended for public instruction, perhaps to be com- 
mitted to memory, and thereby impressed the more deeply on the 

souls of the people. The historic allusions are important : 

"When he strove with" [better, when he subdued, conquered] 
"the Syrians of the rivers," i. e., of Mesopotamia — the country 
between the Euphrates and the Tigris — 11 and the Syrians of 
Zobah " — a Syrian province north of Damascus, stretching from 

Hamath to the Euphrates. Another prominent feature in this 

series of wars and conquests, is that at this time Joab turned his 
hand against Edoni, and slew of their hosts, twelve thousand in 
the valley of salt — a well known locality near the confines of 
Judah and Edom, and adjacent to a very extraordinary salt-moun- 
tain, explored and described by Dr. Robinson in his Biblical 
Researches in Palestine (Vol. 2 : 481-484). Jewish history treats 
briefly of these wars and conquests (2 Sam. 8, and 1 Chron. 18). 
The passage, 2 Sam 8 : 13, has the word Syrians, but probably by 
mistake, for Edomites, which appears both in 1 Chron. 18 : 12, 
and in our caption here. The close resemblance in the Hebrew, 

between Edom and Aram, accounts readily for this error. The 

Syrians on the Xorth and East, and the Edomites on the South 
and South-east — the most powerful among all the adjacent king- 
doms, made common cause against David, so that this eventful 
year became a crisis of immensely critical interest to himself and 
his people. Hence the pertinence of this Psalm. These were 
live issues, instinct with every element of vital interest. Would 
their God indeed be with his covenant people ? Would he make 
them victorious over these ancient and mighty nations ? 

1. O God, thou hast cast us off, thou hast scattered us, 
thou hast been displeased ; O turn thyself to us again. 

"Thou hast cast us off" with loathing, the original word implies. 
The time when is not definitely indicated ; but such periods of re- 
jection — casting them off for their abominations — had been not 
infrequent during the times of Saul and of the Judges. If God 
were to do the same at the time of this writing, the combination of 
their most powerful enemies against them would be their ruin. 
Hence the prayer — " O turn thou to us in forgiving mercy again! " 

2. Thou hast made the earth to tremble; thou hast 
broken it: heal the breaches thereof; for it shaketh. 

3. Thou hast showed thy people hard things : thou hast 
made us to drink the wine of astonishment. 

"Hast broken it;" literally, hast rent it as with an earthquake. 
Socially and politically their case had been like that of a country 



248 



PSALM LX. 



rent and fissured by earthquakes — the people in consternation as 
if nothing was firm beneath their feet. God had made them see 
hard times; they reeled under the shock of disaster as men reel 
from excess of wine. " The wine of astonishment " is such and 
so much as produces intoxication. The word for "astonishment" 
describes not so much a state of mind as of body — simple drunk- 
enness and its physical conditions. Politically the Psalmist would 
say, the people felt themselves helpless, stunned, despairing. 

4. Thou hast given a banner to them that fear thee, that 
it may be displayed because of the truth. Selah. 

• Here the Psalm assumes the tone of hopefulness and trust. To 
those that fear thee, thy obedient people, thou hast given a banner 
to be unfurled because of truth — truth in the sense either of thy 
faithfulness to thy promises, or of their fidelity to thee, their God. 

In either sense the reasoning is pertinent, "Selah" indicates 

that this consideration should be pondered solemnly. 

5. That thy beloved may be delivered ; save with thy 
right hand, and hear me. 

It was ground of hope that God had manifested the most tender, 
compassionate love for his chosen people. Now, therefore, that 
the people thou hast so loved may be saved from their powerful 
enemies, hear our prayer [" answer us" being the better reading] 
and save with thy strong right hand. 

6. God hath spoken in his holiness ; I will rejoice, I will 
divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth. 

7: Gilead is mine, and Manasseh is mine ; Ephraim also 
is the strength of mine head ; Judah is my law-giver ; 

8. Moab is my washpot ; over Edom will I cast out my 
shoe : Philistia, triumph thou because of me. 

The mind seems here to fall back upon God's ancient promise 
of Canaan to Abraham and his seed. That precious word of 
promise "God spake in his holiness ;'' consequently his veracity is 
forever pledged, and despite of whatever delays or apparent reverses, 
it will surely be fulfilled. On the strength of this promise David 
sings — " I will rejoice," for I am sure of Canaan in its largest ex- 
tent. This promised extent made the great river [Euphrates] its 
eastern boundary: "Unto thy seed have I given this land, from 
the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates (Gen. 
15: 18). So also Ex. 23: 21, and Num. 34: 1-13, and Deut. 
11 : 24. The conquest under Joshua comes up afresh before his 
mind and he sees himself in like manner sure of possessing those 
extensive regions North and East, which fell within the original 
grant, but had not as yet been wrested from Israel's national 
enemies. His words, "divide," "mete out," come from the re- 
cords of Joshua's work (Joshua 13: 7, and 18: 5). "Shechem," 
within the tribe of Ephraim and for ages a prominent city on the 



PSALM LX. 



249 



West of Jordan, represents the cities in that entire section; while 
. " Succoth " on the East of Jordan is the representative city for all 
the Eastern section. It is probably more than a mere coincidence 
that both these cities appear under these names in the account of 
Jacob's return from Padan-aram to this promised land to re-assert 
his hereditary title and preempt by actual possession. See Gen. 33 : 
17, 18. At Succoth he made booths for his cattle, thus giving the place 
its significant name. At Shechem he pitched his tent and set up 
his altar to the God of Israel. Hence these names were associated 
with hallowed, inspiring memories. "Gilead" (a comprehen- 
sive name for a large district East of Jordan) "is mine;" "Man- 
asseh" — (a tribe populous enough to hold one large territory on 
the West of Jordan and another on the East) "is also mine;" 
Ephraim (if not first, yet at least second in population and in 
power) is thought of as " the strength of his head," meaning the 
protection of his life — his life-guard ; while Judah has the pre- 
eminence as bearing the scepter, with reference probably to the 
prophecy (Gen. 49: 10) which honored Judah with precisely this 

distinction. Moab is doomed to most servile purposes, tributary 

to her far more powerful neighbor. " Upon' (rather than " over'') 
" Edom will I cast my shoe " — a thing closely associated with the 
" washpot," and like that referring (it would seem) to the custom 
of putting upon the most menial servants the duty of washing 
their master's feet. "Upon Edom will I cast my shoe" signifies 
that I will give it to him to take care of, preparatory to Washing 

my feet, or throw it to him or at him to indicate his duty. 

Philistia is a third power in this subject and menial class. Some 
critics take these words for irony : "Now, Philistia, send up thy 
shouts of victory over the stripling David ! " But they may mean 
in sober earnest — "Join thou, O Philistia, in the applause which 
shall greet me as the sole monarch of all the lands promised of 
old to the seed of Abraham." The tone of this entire passage 
(v. 8) is that of confident assurance of the conquest of all these 
nations, so long formidable to Israel, but at that time subjugated 
through God's blessing upon the arms of David. 

9. Who will bring me into the strong city? who will 
lead me into Edom? 

10. Wilt not thou, O God, ivhich hadst cast us off? and 
thou, O God, ivhich didst not go out with our armies ? 

But at the time of this writing, these achievements were rather 
present to his faith than realized fully in fact. At least one 
strong city the marvel of its time for its military strength, the 
wonder of the ages for what both nature and art had done for it — 
Petra — the rock-hewn capital of ancient Edom, remained to be 
snbdued. Who will bring me into that city of strength? Wilt 
not thou, O God, — thou who in former years didst cast us off with 
loathing for our sins, and to whom Ave had to say — " thou wilt not 
go forth with our armies" ? The last verb being future in tense, I 



250 



PSALM LXI. 



give it this turn, the sense manifestly being that in some previous 
periods then before the mind, God would not go out with his 
people Israel to give them victory. But the Psalmist's prayer is 
that God would now in mercy forgive, and appear at length to 
make them victorious over their most powerful foes. 

11. Give us help from trouble : for yam is the help of 
man. 

12. Through God we shall do valiantly : for he it is that 
shall tread down our enemies. 

"Give us help /row. our enemies" (better than "from trouble") 
"for vain is salvation from frail man" — this word for "man" 
suggesting strongly his special frailty as one made of the earth. 

"Through God we shall develop strength" — exercise martial 

power — seems to be the exact idea, yet of course implying success 
and victory in war. The same words appear in Balaam's proph- 
ecy (Num. 24: 18); " And Edom shall be a possession and Seir 
also shall be a possession for his enemies; and Israel shall do 

valiantly." All this comes of being truly in God — which is the 

most exact equivalent of the Hebrew words translated, " through 
God." Being in harmony with him, hidden in him as our life, 
perfectly united with him in sympathy, we can do any thing ) or 
rather there is nothing that he can not and will not do for ris, for 
he it is who shall tread down our foes beneath his glorious feet! 

OOX^CHO 

PSALM LXI. 

In the caption, "To the chief musician upon Xeginah, a Psalm 
of David," the word "Neginah'' belongs to a family which de- 
scribe a musical instrument. The form of the word seems to im- 
ply that it was David's, perhaps as being his invention. We 

are left to infer the occasion and date of this Psalm from its con- 
tents. The utmost we can say is that it might well have been 
written by David to describe his experience, during his temporary 
exile from Jerusalem in consequence of the conspiracy of Absa- 
lom. 

1. Hear my cry, O God ; attend unto my prayer. 

2. From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when 
my heart is overwhelmed : lead me to the rock that is 
higher than I. 

3. For thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong 
tower from the enemy. 

A Hebrew might say, "From the ends of the earth," with no 
reference to the lands on the other side of the globe. The word 
for "earth" is often used of the land of Palestine, to the remote 



PSALM LXI. 251 

districts of which David fled across the Jordan from the face of 
Absalom. Or we may take this language as an index of his feel- 
ing of exile and loneliness when thrust away from the city of his 
throne and of his God. To such a heart as David's such an exile 

would seem like a banishment to the ends of the earth. From 

this heart-oppressing exile — his soul overwhelmed with grief — he 
cried to God for help. Verily, that was a time for a child of God 
to pray! Why should he not? What else could he think of? 

Whither else could he turn for help? "Lead me to the rock 

which is too high for me to reach for safety without a guiding 
and helping hand." He pleads what God had done in his former 
exigencies : " For thou hast in other days been a shelter for me : 

So be thou my shelter yet again." This is one of the comforts 

of Christian experience — the logic of past mercies, good to inspire 
hope and prayer for help under pending and pressing want. 

4. I will abide in thy tabernacle forever : I will trust in 
the covert of thy wings. Selah. 

" I will abide " is more precisely, "Let me abide" — the peculiar 
form of the verb indicating most earnest desire and prayer. This 
is the utterance of David's heart. Having loved the house and 
worship of God in his holy tabernacle above his chief joy ; having 
given to it his best thoughts, his noblest powers of poetry and song ; 
and having rested in the sweetness of trust and in the simplicity 
of faith upon God's promises to himself and his seed for genera- 
tions to come, including the Great Messiah as the ultimate con- 
summation of these promises (See 2 Sam. 7), what could be more 
fitting than this outpouring of prayer and this utterance of his 

strong confidence in God ? "Selah" is fully in place here. Let 

the pious reader pause and enter into the sympathies of David's 
great and god-like heart ! 

5. For thou, O God, hast heard my vows : thou hast 
given me the heritage of those that fear thy name. 

" Heard my vows," i. e. the prayer which was in them, which 
constituted the soul of those vows. To all the fearers of his name 
God gives a heritage of blessings. David is consciously with them 
in spirit and character; God has recognized him as one of them 
by giving him in past days his portion of their heritage. 

6. Thou wilt prolong the king's life : and his years as 
many generations. 

7. He shall abide before God forever : O prepare mercy 
and truth, ivkich may preserve him. 

We may suppose that during this exile David had a sustaining 
trust in God that he should live to return to his home, city, and 
throne; yet this language manifestly looks quite beyond his own 
personal life. The germ of the idea lying here is in the perpetuity 



252 



PSALM LXI. 



of his throne in his posterity. This idea was boldly prominent in 
the promise as made him through Nathan the prophet (2 Sam. 7 : 
11-20) and reproduced (Ps. 89: 19-37): "When thy days shall be 
fulfilled, and thou shalt sleep with thy fathers, I will set up thy 
seed after thee, and I will establish his kingdom." Whereupon 
David expressed the deep emotions of his heart in the words : 
" Who am I, O Lord. God, and what is my house that thou halt 
brought me hitherto ? And this was yet a small thing in thy sight, 
O Lord. God; but thou hast spoken also of thy servant's house for 
a great while to come " (2 Sam. 7: 18, 19). The writer of Ps. 89 
makes this point peculiarly strong : " Once [ one thing ] have I 
sworn by my holiness that I will not lie unto David. His seed 
shall endure forever and his throne as the sun before me," etc. (Ps. 

89 : 35, 36). It may not be possible for us to say how fully 

developed David's views were of that greater Son who was to hold 
his throne forever ; but we know that they took hold powerfully of 
his heart. We might trace this doctrine also in many prophecies 
of later date. The father of John Baptist, filled with the Holy 
Ghost, prophesied, saying: "Blessed be the Lord God of Israel, 
for he hath visited and redeemed his people, and hath raised up 
a horn of salvation [a powerful Savior] for us in the house of his 
servant David as he spake by the mouth of his holy prophets which 

have been since the world began" (Luke 1: 67-70.) It is a 

matter of curious interest that the Chaldee Targum paraphrases 
these words": "Thou wilt add days upon days to King Messiah;" 
and closes the Psalm thus: " I will pay my vows in the day of the 
redemption of Israel, and on the day in which King Messiah will he 
anointed to reign.'' This may be supposed to give the traditional 
interpretation of the Psalm by the learned Jews during the period 

shortly before the coming of Christ. " O prepare mercy and 

truth" — in the sense, appoint or ordain that thy mercy and truth 
shall be manifested in his behalf. 

8. So will I sing praise unto thy name forever, that I 
may daily perform my yows. 

So in this hope, inspired by this sweet confidence in thy 

promise, I will sing the praises of thy name forever. Regarding 

this Psalm as giving expression to David's thought and feeling 
during those bitter days of exile from his throne before Absalom, 
we see that his religion was a living power in his soul — a fountain 
of inspiration to his hope and endurance — an inexpressible com- 
fort to his otherwise desolate heart. What time all else, or almost 
all, had failed him, his hope still rested on God's promise. He 
had known God; had trusted him through scenes of sore and 
searching trial before; and this new avalanche of trouble only 
drove him again to the same Refuge. 



PSALM LXII. 



253 



PSALM LXII. 

. In the caption to this Psalm as in Ps. 39 and 77, we have the 
words, " To Jeduthun." See Notes on the caption to Ps. 39. 
There is nothing in the Psalm which determines with certainty its 
date and special occasion. Some critics locate it in the times of 
Absalom ; others, in the times of Saul. Specially pertinent to the 
latter is the very frequent figure of a "rock" to signify safety and 
refuge; the intimation also that he stood chiefly alone against 
numerous foes (v. 3), and that those foes resorted to slander and 
lies for his destruction (v. 4). The central thought — the key-note 
of the Psalm is — God only my help and salvation : man powerless 
to harm me, but God almighty to defend. 

1. Truly my soul waiteth upon God: from him cometh 
my salvation. 

It is noticeable here that the word for " wait " is properly silent. 
" My soul is silent toward God." In reverent awe and quiet trust 
my soul sits peacefully before him, biding his time for deliverance, 
trustful that he doeth all things well. The same word, in a dif- 
ferent •.grammatical form, occurs v. 5: My soul, be thou silent 

toward God only. Another of the very characteristic words of this 

Psalm is the first one of this verse, here translated " truly," but 
better, "only." It occurs six times in this short Psalm (vs. 1, 2, 4, 
5, 6, 9). The English version translates it " only " in four of these 
cases; " truly," in v. 1, and "surely," in v. 9. The uniform sense 
" only " is right. In God only, to the complete exclusion of every 
other help, do I put my trust. 

2. He only is my rock and my salvation ; he is my 
defense ; I shall not be greatly moved. 

" My defense " — my high place, castle, tower, or mountain-top, 

lifting me above the missile weapons of my foes. " Shall not be 

greatly moved." Though I may not escape all disturbance from 
these foes who seek my life, yet my God will preserve me from 
any serious results. 

3. How long will ye imagine mischief against- a man ? ye 
shall be slain all of you : as a bowing wall shall ye be, and as 
a tottering fence. 

Critically, there are two principal points to be settled in the 
construction of this verse : (a) Whether the question, " How long," 
should govern the last clause as well as the first ; (b) Whether the 
verb " be slain" is in the active voice or the passive, since on this 
point the best authorities are divided. On these points the evi- 
dence seems to me to favor the former alternative in each case. 
So construed, I would translate : " How long will ye assail [rush 
violently upon] a man ? How long will ye, all of you, murderously 



254 



PSALM LXII. 



thrust at one who is only a leaning city-wall, a stone wall pushed 
almost over?" The thought is that which David put to Saul 
(1 Sam. 24: 14): "After whom is the king of Israel come out? 
After whom dost thou pursue ? After a dead dog, after a flea." ' 

4. They only consult to cast him down from his excel- 
lency : they delight in lies : they bless with their mouth, 
but they curse inwardly. Selah. 

They counsel only to hurl him down from his position [i. e., in 
the public confidence], and they aim to do this by lies — false 
accusations. The suffering party is obviously the same in this 
verse as in the preceding, i. <?., David, remorselessly persecuted 
by his malign enemies. The representation corresponds fully to 
his case when persecuted by Saul. 

5- My soul, wait thou only upon God ; for my expecta- 
tion is from him. 

6. He only is my rock and my salvation : he is my de- 
fense ; I shall not be moved. 

7. In God is my salvation and my glory : the rock of my 
strength, and my refuge, is in God. 

"Wait," i. e., in silent, quiet expectation, and serene trust. 
The leading verb means : Be thou silent toward God, O my soul. 
Emphatic here is the word "only" Look to God and to him 
only ; to no one else ; shut off absolutely all other reliance ; settle 
it deeply in thy soul that no other help is to be thought of. His 
is all-sufficient ; none other can avail to the least purpose what- 
ever. 

8. Trust in him at all times ; ye people, pour out your 
heart before him : God is a refuge for us. Selah. 

David's faith had been so richly joyous to his own soul, and had 
brought him such salvation over his personal enemies, that he can 
now commend it most heartily to all people in all their possi- 
ble emergencies. O, all ye people of every name and of all con- 
ditions — at all times, under whatever trials or straits — pour out 
your heart before this great and bountiful God. He is a refuge 
for all who put their trust in him. Pause and think of it ! Bur- 
dened hearts will here find their burdens lifted ; desolate hearts 
will be cheered ; the sad will be made joyful ; the lost will be 
saved, in the love and the might of this perfect Savior. 

9. Surely men of low degree are vanity, and men of high 
degree are a lie : to be laid in the balance, they are alto- 
gether lighter than vanity. 

Only [better than "surely"], "only a vanity are the sons of 
mortals ; only a lie are the sons of mighty men ; in the scales to 
go up," i. e., destined or sure to mount up if put on the scales. 



PSALM LXIII. 



255 



All these together are less [lighter] than a breath. Two Hebrew 
words for man — the man of the earth, frail ; and the man in power 
and dignity, commanding — are brought together here to give force 
to this statement : that all men alike — the least or the greatest — 
are less than a breath when measured against the Great God. 

10. Trust not in oppression, and become not vain in rob- 
bery : if riches increase, set not your heart upon tJiem. 

Do not think to accomplish your ends of wealth or power by 
oppression; indulge no vain hope of good from robbery; for how 
can you prosper in the end, arrayed in the wrong against the 

Mighty God ? The historical reference, if any, in these words, 

is not apparent. But it is easy to see that the main doctrine of 
the Psalm is applied here to the great mass of human activities in 
ordinary life. Take care that ye do not pursue worldly good in 
ways that God must abhor, and will sooner or later frustrate and 
terribly punish! 

11. God hath spoken once ; twice have I heard this ; 
that power belongeth unto God. 

12. Also unto thee, 0 Lord, belongeth mercy : for thou 
renderest to every man according to his work. 

"One thing" [not, "atone time"] "God hath said; these two 
things have 1 heard, [i. <?., from him] ; viz., that power is to God, 
and that to thee, O Lord, is mercy, for thou dost render to man 
according to his works." These great central truths in respect to 
.God and his ways with man were impressively revealed to the an- 
cients of David's time, and indeed to the ages long before. They 
are here because they bear strongly on the points contemplated in 
this Psalm. This Great God, of boundless power, and of blended 
justice and mercy, will for evermore take cognizance of the moral 
life of his creature man. Let none think to evade his judgments ! 
Let the most hardened sinner stand in awe before this great and 
holy God ! To all who wait before him in silent reverence and 
obedient trust, it shall be well; but woe to him who recklessly 
disowns his authority and tramples on his law ! 

PSALM LXIII. 

The statement prefixed here, " A Psalm of David when he was 
in the wilderness of Judah," leaves the question still open between 
his wanderings when fleeing before Saul, and his flight before Ab- 
salom. During the former, he was. often secreting himself in that 
wilderness ; in the history of the latter, occur several allusions to 
his being in this wilderness. See 2 Sam. 15: 23, 28, and 16: 2, 
and 17 : 16. The question, however, is substantially settled in 
favor of the times of Absalom: (a) by the reference to " the king," 



256 



PSALM LXIII. 



(v. 11), which could scarcely be said of himself in a Psalm refer- 
ring to the times of Saul, but is entirely in place for the times of 
Absalom; (see also Ps. 61: 6); (b) by the strong points in com- 
mon between this Psalm and others which belong to the later 
persecution. Notice especially his longing for the house of God 
and its worship, as one who had been at home there for many 
sweet years of life. Compare vs. 1, 2 with Ps. 42: 1-4, and 61 : 
2-4. We may therefore assign this Psalm to the times of Absalom's 
conspiracy. 

1. O God, thou art my God ; early will I seek thee : my 
soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry 
and thirsty land, where no water is ; 

2. To see thy power and thy glory, so as I have seen 
thee in the sanctuary. 

In this hour of extremest trial, when his own son heads a pow- 
erful rebellion, and hosts of his old friends forsake him and 
combine to sustain this uprising, his soul turns to his God as to 
his best and only capable Helper. "Thou art my God" — with a 
precious emphasis on u my;" 1 will seek thee both early and 
earnestly — with the early dawn of morning, and as those do who 
are up betimes to indulge the most yearning desire of their heart. 
Thirst in the dry wilderness ; his very body and soul fainting and 
longing for God, as the parched tongue for water — set forth his 
case. 0 might he see God's power and glory revealed here and 
now in his behalf, as he had often heard of, and virtually seen, in 
the worship of the sanctuary, where the glorious deeds of Israel's 
God, in ancient days, had been the theme of speech and song. It 
was not precisely that those deeds of power and glory had been 
done in the sanctuary, but that they had been brought to mind 
there — reproduced and re-impressed amid those scenes of wor- 
ship. 

3. Because thy loving-kindness is better than life, my 
lips shall praise thee. 

4. Thus will I bless thee while I live : I will lift up my 
hands in thy name. 

"Better than life" — not merely than such a life as this here in 
the desert, but better than any life — better than life itself, thought 
of as what men most desire and love. Because thy loving-kind- 
ness is so precious my lips shall praise thee; I will bless [honor 

and praise] thee, long as I live. To "lift up the hands" toward 

God indicates prayer; perhaps praise also. "In thy name" — in 
honor of it, and in appropriate worship. See Ps. 28 : 2. 

5. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness ; 
and my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips. 

6. When I remember thee upon my bed, and meditate on 
thee in the night watches. 



PSALM LXIII. 



257 



7. Because thou hast been my help, therefore in the 
shadow of thy wings will I rejoice. 

Assuming that at this stage of his experiences he is yet in the 
wilderness; weariness and thirst upon him; the great issue of 
battle 'still pending; nothing to assure him of victory except God's 
faithfulness in promise and his strong arm, it was a bold thing for 
David to say — "My soul shall be satisfied as with most luxurious 
food, my mouth shall praise thee with lips of joy" as I think of 
thee in the dead of night, and all this because thou hast in other 
days been my Almighty helper. I know thy wing is outspread 
over me. Why shall not this be all-sufficient for my protection in 
future and for my peace and even joy through these nights and days 
of sternest peril and most critical exigency ? 

8. My soul followeth hard after thee : thy right hand 
upholdeth me. 

My soul cleaveth to thee, following earnestly after thee, for the 
original words blend these two ideas. I can not let thee go; I 
cling to thy side, pressing upon thy steps. 

9. But those that seek my soul, to destroy it, shall go 
into the lower parts of the earth. 

10. They shall fall by the sword : they shall be a por- 
tion for foxes. 

The original leaves it in some doubt whether David means — 
They seek my life to their own destruction ; or, as the English 
version puts it, seek my life to destroy it. In the former con- 
struction, the two clauses of the verse are parallel in sentiment — 

which is common Hebrew usage. "Go into the lower parts of 

the earth" — the grave, under ground. Men shall pour them 

out, or they shall be poured out upon the hand of the sword, is the 

literal rendering; the sense being this — given over to its power. 

A portion for jackals, rather than "foxes" — animals that prey 
upon the slain. 

11. But the king shall rejoice in God; every one that 
sweareth by him shall glory : but the mouth of them that 
speak lies shall be stopped. 

"The king," is said of himself, but of himself because he was 
God's anointed. He shall rejoice in God who is ever faithful to 

his anointed servant. Every one that sweareth in or by this 

God of Israel and standeth in allegiance to him instead of turning 
rebel, shall glory; but the mouth of them that " speak lies" — for- 
swearing their oath of allegiance and swearing to the new usurper, 
shall be violently shut. 



258 



PSALM LXIV. 



PSALM LXIV. 

In this Psalm, the short caption, "To the chief musician, a 
Psalm of David," gives not the least hint of the time or occasion 
of this writing. Its location, following Psalms (supposably, 61-63, 
and almost certainly 61 and 63) which refer to the times of Absa- 
lom, combines with its obvious fitness to those times to render this 
date highly probable. Recurring to that history as we have it 
(2 Sam. ]5-17) we shall notice (especially in 2 Sam. 15: 31-37, 
and 16: 15-25, and 17: 1-14), how very prominently the plans 
and counsels of that rebellion are brought before us, and how 
deeply David's heart was affected by the part played therein by his 
old, long-tried counselor, Ahithophel. It should be noted also 
that of the two points of advice offered by Ahithophel, the first, the 
one followed, was not only crafty, sagacious, but horribly Satanic, 
unutterably heartless as toward his old friend, and as void of 
purity and honor as can well be imagined. .For Absalom's suc- 
cess, doubtless the first thing was to commit his followers beyond 
all possible retreat — to make the breach between them and their 
late sovereign too wide to be bridged over again. So Ahithophel 
counseled Absalom to outrage his father's bed in the presence of 
all Israel ! We are amazed that even political rebellion could 
have gone down to such a depth of vileness. We shall not won- 
der that David's soul felt this wrong intensely, and gave some ex- 
pression in his sacred Psalms, both to his deep reprobation of it 
and to the moral lessons which God gave men from it in the way 
of swift retribution upon such monstrous and notorious depravity. 

In this Psalm the central theme is the counselings of his 

enemies against him ; the secrecy and malignity of their plots ; 
their exultation in the assurance of success, coupled with God's 
swift and terrible retribution under which their schemes recoiled 
fatally upon themselves — from which result the nation learned 
something more of God, and the righteous rejoiced with great 

joy- 

1. Hear my voice, O God, in my prayer: preserve my 
life from fear of the enemy. 

The Hebrew word for " prayer " suggests an outflowing from the 

heart of sighs and moans. Preserve, not my heart from fearing 

the enemy, but my life from that which is to be feared — the ruin 
he plots against me. 

2. Hide me from the secret counsel of the wicked ; from 
the insurrection of the workers of iniquity : 

3. Who whet their tongue like a sword, and bend their 
bows to shoot their arrows, even bitter words : 

4. That they may shoot in secret at the perfect : sud- 
denly do they shoot at him, and fear not. 



PSALM LXIV. 



259 



In v. 2 the original word for "insurrection" should mean, either 
the crowded throng, or the tumult they make ; probably the former, 
with reference to the great numerical force of this uprising under 
Absalom. It seems that the masses of the people were in it. 
Then their leading spirits were thought of as traducing the old 
king, doing their utmost to justify this rebellion by abusing his 
administration and blackening his character. They whet their 
tongue as they would a sword; their arrows are bitter words. Ah, 
how bitter is such fatal slander, aimed not only at the life of this 
aged and noble king, but at the ruin, politically, morally, relig- 
iously, of his realm. As usual, preparing the bow forjmmediate 

use is called "treading the arrow" — the bow being sprung with 

the foot. " Shoot at the perfect" — one who is entirely innocent 

of the charges they bring against him, and therefore, as to the mat- 
ter in hand, perfect, sinless. 

5. They encourage themselves in an evil matter : they 
commune of laying snares privily; they say, Who shall 
see them ? 

Strictly, they make strong, not their heart but their wicked thing, 
the vile plot they are consecrating. They consult to hide their 
snares, etc. 

6. They search out iniquities ; they accomplish a diligent 
search : both the inward thought of every one of them, and 
the heart, is deep. 

They search out the wickedest things possible, as if the highest 
point of their ambition was to reach the consummation of wicked- 
ness. Instead of our translation, " They accomplish a diligent 

search," the Hebrew requires the first person plural, thus : " We 
have perfected a well-devised scheme." Dr. Alexander trans- 
lates : [They say] we are ready — a consummate plan ! " The 
Psalmist closes, saying — Their plans are deep laid, etc. 

7. But God shall shoot at them with an arrow ; suddenly 
shall they be wounded. 

As they had put their arrow to the bow (vs. 3, 4) to shoot sud- 
denly and in secret ; so God now suddenly lets fly his arrow at 
them ; and they are the wounded men — they, not those whom 
they wickedly sought to slay. Literally, the wounds are their own 
—upon themselves. This is retribution — so perfectly in manner 
like the sin it punishes as to suggest to all mankind why these 
shafts of the Almighty strike there! This is God's way. 

8. So they shall make their own tongue to fall upon 
themselves : all that see them shall flee away. 

Critics differ slightly in the grammatical construction of the 
first clause, but concur substantially in the thought expressed, 
viz., that the conspirators spoken of wrought out their own de- 



260 



PSALM LXV. 



struction by the very schemes of slander and mischief which 
they concocted for another's ruin. And so they made it (God's 
arrow, or the ruin it symbolizes) fall upon themselves, even their 
tongue ; i. e., they, personified by their guilty tongue, brought 

down this recoil of judgment upon themselves. "Flee away," 

scattering, the word suggests, as wanderers and vagabonds. 

9. And all men shall fear, and shall declare the work of 
God ; for they shall wisely consider of his doing. 

10. The righteous shall be glad in the Lord, and shall 
trust in him ; and all the upright in heart shall glory. 

Perhaps, "shall declare" it to be God's work. They shall 
have wiser views of his working than ever before. The moral 
impression upon the nation at large and upon the world shall be 
wholesome. The righteous shall feel fresh confidence that God 
will defend their cause against the wicked. All the upright will 
sympathize with the pious king of Israel in what God has wrought 
for his deliverance. 

PSALM LXV. 

The caption, " To the chief Musician, a Psalm and song of 
David," gives not the least intimation as to the historic occasion 
of this Psalm. The Psalm itself is equally destitute of any defi- 
nite historic allusion. It is admirably pertinent to a national 
thanksgiving for abundant harvests, especially for rain after 
drought and impending or real famine. There are points in it 
which would make it appropriate to David's return to his beloved 
Zion after his flight and exile through fear of Absalom, and doubly 
so if (as some have supposed) this return were accompanied with 
rain and plenty after famine. But these points should be regarded 
as hypothetical only. Fortunately the Psalm loses none of its rare 
beauty by reason of our uncertainty as to its original adaptation. 
We may take its sweet words and apply them to very many of the 
varied scenes of ever shifting human life ; for when is God other 
or less than the Infinite Fountain of all blessings ! 

1. Praise waiteth for thee, O God, in Zion : and unto 
thee shall the vow be performed. 

2. O thou that nearest prayer, unto thee shall all flesh 
come. 

According to our Hebrew text, the word translated "waiteth" 
is a noun, used often in the sense of silence; here, of silent trust. 
(See Notes on Ps. 62: 1). "To thee, O God, belong silent trust 
and grateful praise; these become thee and thou art worthy to 
receive them from thy worshipers in Zion." " To thee let the vow 
be performed." This is appropriate to the case of David coming 
home to the holy city to pay the vow made to God in the day of 



PSALM LXV. 



261 



his calamity from treason and exile. Unto God, so well known 

as the Hearer of prayer, let all the needy come ! And their prayer 
having been answered, let them come yet again with their grateful 
thank-offering ! 

3. Iniquities prevail against me : as for our transgressions, 
thou shalt purge them away. 

The Hebrew gives here " Words " [or matters] "of iniquity " — 
which certainly may refer to malignant plots of mischief concocted 
by Absalom and his party; or might apply to the machinations 

and slanders of Saul for his destruction. "Prevail; " are too 

strong for me in my unaided strength to withstand; but (the im- 
plication is) the Lord became my salvation. "Our transgres- 
sions — thou shalt cover them; " the usual word for atone, hide from 
view by forgiveness. So far forth as the calamities which befel us 
were the fruit of our sins, thou hast graciously forgiven the sin, 
and then relieved us from those calamities. This is the experience 
of God's children in all ages. 

4. Blessed is the man whom thou choosest, and causest to 
approach unto thee, that he may dwell in thy courts : we 
shall be satisfied with the goodness of thy house, even of thy 
holy temple. 

These words of David become specially impressive considered as 
said and sung after those sad plaints of a soul thirsting and long- 
ing for God in a dry and desolate land far away from the city and 
sanctuary where God revealed his presence. O blessed the man 
chosen of God and brought very near, even to dwell in thy courts : 
O shall we not all be satisfied, {filled with satisfying joy, the word 
means) from the goodness of thy house, that holy temple ! But 
the words bear a precious truth for any and all of the children of 
God who have known his presence and his love in his earthly 
sanctuary. 

5. By terrible things in righteousness wilt thou answer 
us, O God of our salvation ; who art the confidence of all the 
ends of the earth, and of them that are afar off upon the 
sea : 

6. Which by his strength setteth fast the mountains; 
being girded with power : 

7. Which stilleth the noise of the seas, the noise of their 
waves, and the tumult of the people. 

We can not affirm that in these words David thought of those 
terrible things in righteousness by which God answered his prayer 
for life and kingdom when he caused so many thousands of Israel 
to fall in the dread battle of the wood of Ephraim, and his an- 
guished heart bewailed so bitterly the death of the much loved but 
guilty Absalom; yet we can see that the words are signally 
12 



262 



PSALM LXV. 



apposite to those circumstances. It often costs terrible things in 
righteousness to right the cruel wrongs of earth. Justice is more 
than precious — it is glorious ; but its ministrations of deserved 
retribution are not seldom "terrible." Yet it is as "the God of 
our salvation" that he deals such fearful vengeance on guilty 

oppressors. Beautifully is he said to be "the confidence of all 

the ends of the earth " — worthy to be trusted by people of every 
nation, every clime under the whole heavens ! Think of his power ! 
How firmly does he set the mountains on their foundations ! How 
easily can he hush the roar of the ocean and make his breakers 
quiet ! And the tumults of nations with like infinite ease. The 
surgings of that uprising under Absalom, how speedily did the 
voice of the Lord hush them into silence ! 

8. They also that dwell in the uttermost parts are afraid 
at thy tokens : thou makest the outgoings of the morning 
and evening to rejoice. 

This power is felt to the ends of the earth, for Israel's God is not 
a merely provincial Deity, as the heathen gods were thought to 

be, but the true God of the whole wide world. " The outgoings 

of the morning and of the evening" should mean primarily the 
regions of the East where the sun first appears and " goes forth as 
a bridegroom, rejoicing to. run a race," and of the West where he 
goes from human view; then, secondly, the •people of those ex- 
treme quarters of the earth — which is the sense here. Thou 
glorious God givest joy to all the living, even to the most remote 
and least known regions of the earth. 

9. Thou visitest the earth, and waterest it : thou greatly 
enriches t it with the river of God, which is full of water : 
thou preparest them corn, when thou hast so provided 
for it. 

10. Thou waterest the ridges thereof abundantly : thou 
settlest the furrows thereof : thou makest it soft with 
showers : thou blessest the springing thereof. 

It is God and not Nature apart from God, who visits the earth 
with rain and in the rain. The "river of God" like "mountain 
of God," is a great river, a stream swollen with his own powerful 

rains. "Thou wilt prepare their corn when thou shalt have so 

prepared it (the earth) to produce it." The two verbs which I 
translate prepare are in Hebrew the same one. God insures corn 

by first insuring the fertility of the earth. The first two verbs 

in v. 10 may be taken as imperatives: "Its furrows drench, its 
ridges beat down;" with showers thou wilt make it soft and so 
bless its vegetating forces — the upspringing of the young plants 
toward maturity. A fine poetic description of the effect of timely 
showers upon vegetation. 



PSALM LXV. 



263 



11. Thou crownest the year with thy goodness; and thy 
paths drop fatness. 

12. They drop upon the pastures of the wilderness : and 
the little hills rejoice on every side. 

13. The pastures are clothed with flocks ; the valleys 
also are covered over with corn ; they shout for joy, they 
also sing. 

In the first clause, perhaps better thus: "Thou crownest the. 
year of thy goodness." i. e., the year which thou art pleased to 
bless with abundant fertility; "thy paths" — the footsteps of thy 
going forth upon the face of the fields — " drop with fatness "— 

most luxuriant fertility. "The pastures of the wilderness" — 

such there were, for in the life and language of Palestine, the 
wilderness was not a sterile desert, but a hilly, rough country, 
unsuitable for tillage, but often fine for pasturage. These pastures 
are clothed with flocks. Poetically, the hills "gird on joy ' as the 
maiden girds about her robes of beauty. Pastures glorying in 
their flocks, valleys waving with yellow grain, join the chorus of 
song in praise to their great Maker. Do they sympathize with the 
glad hearts of the hungry household and lead off in praise to 
Him who gives them their burdens of blessing ? How much more 
should man, so blessed, remember intelligently the ever present 

hand of his well known Father. High above the poetic beauty 

of this exquisite Psalm is the moral beauty of the sentiment which 
sees God himself and not Nature only nor her so-called "laws," in 
the rains, the green pastures, and the valleys covered over with corn. 
It is God who visits the earth, it is the river of God which bears 
along the copious waters; 11 Thou makest it soft with showers;" 
Thou blessest the springing up of its vegetable growths ; it is thy 
paths — thine own very footsteps over our fields — that distill fatness 
and abundance; it is unto Thee most appropriately that pastures 
and valleys shout the chorus of praise and sing for joy ! Every 
thing full of God; his hand and his footsteps every-where. There 
is no chill of a heartless and Godless philosophy, falsely so-called, on 
the heart of this inspired poet; his glowing soul is warmed by 
the felt presence of an active, energizing God whose handiwork 
and whose blessed footsteps he sees in every thing that grows and 
in every agency that makes growth and beauty and fruitfulness on 
the face of this fair world 

By a very interesting but logical process, Isaac Taylor infers 
from this Psalm the general culture, the tastes, and the piety of 
the Hebrew people of David's time. The data given are the 
Psalm itself; the fact that it was sung in the public worship of 
the sanctuary before and by the assembled thousands of Israel — 
sung manifestly with spirit and enthusiasm; with intelligence 
therefore, and with some adequate conception of its sentiments. 
Now, could a people in whose national literature such a Psalm has 
a prominent place — nay more, in whose liturgy, in whose stated 



264 



PSALM LXVI. 



worship it has its cherished place ; on whose annual thanksgiving 
festival, the great feast of the tabernacles, we may suppose it 
formed the center and culminating point of their enthusiasm — 
could a people so trained, capable of being charmed by the poetry 
of such a song and of being lifted heavenward and Godward by 
its divine sympathies and its recognition of an ever present God, 
be only a "horde of rude and ignorant barbarians?" 

PSALM LXVI. 

The caption here names no author ; alludes to no historic occa- 
sion. We have only : " To the chief Musician ; a Song, a Psalm." 
In quite an unusual degree the scope of this Psalm seems to be 
general rather than specific, witnessing to the glory of God's works 
of deliverance wrought for his people in ancient times, as at the 
Ked Sea and the Jordan ; inferring thence his worthiness to be ex- 
alted and extolled in the praises, not of Israel alone, but of all 
the nations ; with impressive allusion to his chastening hand upon 
his people for their discipline; from which, humbled and proved, 
they found mercy in answer to prayer, and then bore witness to 

the loving faithfulness of their God. It is noticeable that 

throughout vs. 6-12, the writer speaks in the first person plural — 
" we," "our," "us; " but in vs. 13-20, altogether in the singular, 
as if giving his own personal experiences only. But no speciality 
of meaning is intended by this variety. Every reader, every 

singer of this song, may make these words his own. Some 

critics suggest that the strain of this Psalm corresponds so well 
with that "of Ps. 46, that it may probably be referred to the same 
date and occasion. It seems to me equally probable that it bears 
a close relation, in time and purpose, to the 65th — a view, which 
in the absence of other evidence either way, its proximity favors. 
But we must be content to affirm nothing positively on this ques- 
tion. 

1. Make a joyful noise unto God, all ye lands : 

2. Sing forth the honor of his name : make his praise 
glorious. 

The English word "noise" has some unpleasant associations, of 
which the Hebrew word here used is innocent. It denotes none 
but joyous sounds, in glad earnest, from full hearts. The call for 
such joyous acclaim is not to Israel only, but to all lands, and 
rightly — for the God of Israel is the God of every land, of all the 
nations. This great fact their psalmody was careful not to over- 
look. " Make his praise glorious " — literally, a glorious thing, a 

glory; let it be such as will give the Great "God distinctive and 
peculiar honor, high above all other honor and glory. 



PSALM LXVI. 



265 



3. Say unto God, How terrible art thou in thy works ! 
through the greatness of thy power shall thine enemies sub- 
mit themselves unto thee. 

4. All the earth shall worship thee, and shall sing unto 
thee ; they shall sing to thy name. Selah. 

How should thy works impress the nations with fear and awe, as 
toward One whose power none can withstand ! The Hebrew word 

is the common one for the fear and reverence due to God. 

"Submit themselves" — in the sense of straining the truth in 
order to secure terms of peace — the case of the Gibeonites toward 
Joshua (Josh. 9) being a standing example. The Psalmist would 
not recommend a false and treacherous submission, but puts in 
strong light the impression of his resistless power, which God has 
made upon the nations. David has the same word in the same 

sense (Ps. 18 : 44). All the earth shall worship thee, the true 

God, in songs of heart-felt homage, celebrating thy name with in- 
telligent appreciation of its significance, i. e., with worship, neither 

blind as to their intelligence, nor forced as to their will. This 

glorious prophecy stands here as if it rested on God's infinite 
worthiness of such homage. Let it be the gladness of our hearts 
that One so supremely worthy of the pure, intelligent homage of 
"all the earth" has fully purposed to secure it, some day ; it lies 
in the counsels of his blessed will, and can not fail of ultimate ac- 
complishment. " Selah ; " we can afford to pause and dwell on 

a truth so inspiring, so precious ! 

5. Come and see the works of God : he is terrible in his 
doing toward the children of men. 

6. He turned the sea into diy land: they went through 
the flood on foot : there did we rejoice in him. 

Resuming the thought of v. 3, the Psalmist invites us to look 
more considerately on those glorious achievements of Israel's God. 

''Terrible" — the same word here as there. The first reference 

is to the Red Sea ; the next to the passage of the Jordan, here 
called the "flood," but in the Hebrew the river, yet always 
in the sense of a great river. Did not we — the whole nation saved 
by the very arm of our Almighty King — rejoice in him there ? So 
the song of Moses and Miriam on the hither shore of the Sea wit- 
nessed. (Ex. 15: 1-22). 

7. He ruleth by his power forever ; his eyes behold the 
nations : let not the rebellious exalt themselves. Selah. 

Those deeds of the Red Sea and the Jordan were no spasmodic, 
transient outburst of power, but indicate a rule and sway that are 

indeed eternal, abiding, evermore sustained, and never waning. 

His eyes look into the nations, piercing, scanning perfectly. Let 
rebels never lift up themselves against him ! 



266 



PSALM LXVI. 



8. O bless our God, ye people, and make the voice of his 
praise to be heard : 

9. Which holdeth our soul in life, and suffereth not our 
feet to be moved. 

In the phrase, " holdeth our soul in life," the Hebrew verb has 
the sense, to set or put as a special act, and does not suggest that 
constant divine agency in sustaining human life which our English 
version seems to imply. I take it to mean : Who lifts us from peril 
akin to death into safety and well-being, real life. So the next 
clause : Does not permit us to be jostled and thrown down from 
our standing. 

10. For thou, O God, hast proved us: thou hast tried us, 
as silver is tried. 

11. Thou broughtest us into the net ; thou laidest affliction 
upon our loins. 

12. Thou hast caused men to ride over our heads ; we 
went through fire and through water : but thou broughtest 
us out into a wealthy place. 

Here are special illustrations of this general law of God's deal- 
ings with his people, introduced by "/or." In chastisement for 
moral discipline, God had tried and proved his people; bringing 
them into cruel subjection to oppressors; but when they had 

become penitent, he brought them again into abundance. 

" Caused men to ride over our heads" is rather to ride at our head, 
in power over us and we in subjection. " Through fire and through 
water" — figures of sore national calamity. "A wealthy place." 
The Hebrew word occurs elsewhere only in Ps. 23 : 5 ; " My cup 
runneth over" — is abundance itself. It indicates prosperity and 
plenty with allusion to abundant moisture — so essential in the 
climate of Palestine. 

13. I will go into thy house with burnt offerings : I will 
pay thee my vows, 

14. Which my lips have uttered, and my mouth hath 
spoken, when I was in trouble. 

15. I will offer unto thee burnt sacrifices of fatlings, with 
the incense of rams : I will offer bullocks with goats. Selah. 

The pious Israelite found in the law of Moses what sacrifices 
and offerings were appropriate to express his gratitude to God for 
deliverance from affliction. The mercy that turned his sorrow to 
joy — that lifted his burden off and brought him peace and rest, 
was in principle the same thing to the individual as to the nation. 
Hence the transition from what seems to be national history in vs. 
8-12 to individual experience in vs. 13-20 is by no means violent, 
for it involves only the same universal law of God's moral admin- 
istration. 



PSALM LXVII. 



2G7 



16. Come and hear, all ye that fear God, and I will 
declare what he hath done for my soul. 

17. I cried unto him with my mouth, and he was extolled 
with my tongue. 

Beautifully he invites all the pious to hear him testify how 
divine mercy heard his prayer and gave him the richest of bless- 
ings. " Done for my soul " — but the constant use of this Hebrew 

word for " soul" in the sense of life demands a broader application 
here than to merely spiritual blessings. " Done for my life " is the 

more exact rendering. " Extolled with my tongue," but literally, 

praise was under my tongue — praise in the sense of extolling him 
high in esteem and glory. 

18. If I regard iniquity in my heart, the Lord will not 
hear me : 

19. But verily God hath heard me; he hath attended to 
the voice of my prayer. 

20. Blessed be God, which hath not turned away my 
prayer, nor his mercy from me. 

The closer rendering is — " If I had regarded iniquity in my 
heart, the Lord would not have heard me." But verily he has 
heard me, and I bless his name for it, and put my case before all 
that fear him both to encourage and to guide them in their prayer. 
The Great and Holy God looks for a sincere and honest heart in 
those who bow the knee before him, and will hear none else. 

PSALM LXVII. 

This Psalm, short but rich, stands before us with no hint as to 
its author or date, and with no allusions which can throw the least 
light upon its occasion except that v. 6 refers to an abundant har- 
vest. The verb there is in the past tense — " The earth has yielded 
her increase." This therefore may be a thanksgiving song for a 
bountiful harvest — upon which fact is built the prayer and the 
prophecy that He who has shown such mercy and such power to 
save, will also bathe all the nations with his light and glory, and 
fill them with the blessings of his salvation. 

1. God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his 
face to shine upon us ; Selah. 

2. That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving 
health among all nations. 

" Cause his face to shine upon us," with face not averted in 
wrath but turned toward us, beaming with kindness. Nothing 
can be more plain or more pertinent and beautiful than this figure. 
As the human face reveals the human heart, so is God's face 



268 



PSALM LXVIL 



assumed to reveal his. This language seems to be an imitation of 

the doxology prescribed for the priests (Num. 6 : 23-27). This 

light of God's face is thought of also as bringing to us the knowl- 
edge of himself and of his moral government over men — " That 
thy way may be known upon the earth," toward all the sons of 

men. The rare phrase, " saving health," translates the one usual 

Hebrew word for salvation. It can mean nothing more or other 
than that here. What the translators of our version meant beyond 
or different from this does not appear. The prayer is that all the 
nations may become acquainted with the salvation which God has 
provided for them. 

3. Let the people praise thee, O God ; let all the people 
praise thee. 

The English word " people " faithfully translates the Hebrew, 
since the latter admits of being applied to God's chosen Israel, and 
also of being used for all the inhabitants of the world. " All tho 
people" must of course have this widest possible sense. The 
Psalmist therefore exhorts all the nations of men to recognize the 
true God and render him due homage and praise. 

4. O let the nations be glad and sing for joy : for thou 
shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations 
upon earth. Selah. 

Well may they all rejoice and sing with exceeding joy because 
this great and righteous God rules so perfectly, evermore judging 
righteously. The word for "govern" is primarily lead, i. e., to 
take charge of them as a shepherd of his flock, to guide their 
steps, shape their welfare, control their destinies. 

5. Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people 
praise thee. 

6. Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, 
even our own God, shall bless us. 

7. God shall bless us ; and all the ends of the earth shall 
fear him. 

The refrain of this sweet song is this summons of all the people 

to praise. As said above, the tense here is not future but past, 

with no word corresponding to "then." "The earth has produced 
her increase ; " and since special mention is made of this, we may 
assume the production to have been abundant and a fit occasion 
for thanksgiving as well as a ground of assurance that the same 
beneficent God\vould fill the world with his blessings and bring 

all the ends of the earth to fear and praise his name. As we 

have had occasion to notice repeatedly, the religion of Israel was 
no narrow, exclusive thing. Though the center of its worship 
was Jerusalem, its circumference embraced all the nations of the 
earth. Its thought was — The God we worship is no provincial 



PSALM LXVIII. 



2G9 



Deity, such as other nations distinctly recognized their little gods 
to be, but is the God of all the earth, the Great Maker and Ruler 
of all; and he will surely assert his rights in due time and bring 
all the nations to know himself, and to give him the loving wor- 
ship of obedient, grateful, adoring hearts. 



PSALM LXVIII 

This Psalm is ascribed to David. Its key-note is in striking 
harmony with that of the three Psalms next preceding — high 
praises to the God of Israel; in which not only all of Israel but 
all the nations of the earth are summoned to join. In the special 
point of being a rtsumi or recapitulation of the prominent mani- 
festations of God's power and goodness toward Israel, this Psalm 
resembles Ps. 18 — with this main difference, that whereas that 
Psalm pertains specially to the personal history of David, this 
gives in general the history of God's ways with the entire Hebrew 

nation. As to its date and special occasion, some have located 

it "at the removing of the ark." But it does not seem to be par- 
allel with Ps. 24 and 2 Sam. 6. Others assume (on their inter- 
pretation of 2 Sam. 11: 11) that the ark was with the army of 
Joab at the final conquest of Ammon and of its stronghold, 
Rabbah (2 Sam. 12 : 26-31), and that this song was composed to 
be sung upon its victorious re-establishment in Mt. Zion. In my 
view, this theory that the ark itself went to the field of war lacks 
support. But the fact that this was the last recorded war of con- 
quest waged by David against his national enemies favors the 
date of this Psalm upon this occasion. Its allusion to several 
tribes other than Judah (v. 27) forbids our placing it later than 
the revolt ; earlier than David no critic would think of placing it. 

1. Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered : let them 
also that hate him flee before him. 

The point to be specially noted here is that these are the very 
words used by Moses in the wilderness when the ark was taken 
up and moved forward at the head of the marshaled hosts of Is- 
rael (Num. 10 : 35). This seems to have been the customary an- 
nouncement on every such occasion. When it rested the form 
was, "Return, 0 Lord, unto the many thousands of Israel." As 
the ark bore upon and over it the visible symbol of Jehovah's 
presence, it was pertinent to speak of God as arising in his power 
and majesty whenever the ark was taken up, and as returning 

to his rest among his people when the ark rested. Here the 

Psalmist continues the thought : Let God so arise in the manifes- 
tations of his power that his haters shall flee before him. 

2. As smoke is driven away, so drive them away : as wax 



270 



PSALM LXVIII. 



melteth before the fire, so let the wicked perish at the pres- 
ence of God. 

The figures are of the plainest ; As high winds drive the smoke 
and fire melts wax, so let the wicked perish before thy presence. 
Of course wicked men are thought of as opposing God with ma- 
lign effort to thwart his plans, break down his kingdom, withstand 
his work of grace toward his people. Why should not the Great 
Father protect his children and indeed all his creatures against 
whatever Satan may devise and Satan's servants attempt for their 
destruction ? 

3. But let the righteous be glad ; let them rejoice before 
God : yea, let them exceedingly rejoice. 

Be glad that such a God reigns — reigns so wisely, so benevo- 
lently, so gloriously! Let his people rejoice exceedingly that op- 
position against his throne can harm none but the opposers them- 
selves. 

4. Sing unto God, sing praises to his name : extol him 
that rideth upon the heavens by his name JAH, and rejoice 
before him. 

" Extol him that rideth upon the heavens " is magnificent 
poetry; but critical justice to David and to his Hebrew words 
compels us to translate, " Cast up the highway for him who rideth 
in the desert," etc. — the conception being the same which appears 
in Isa. 57 : 14, and 62 : 10, and essentially in Isa. 40 : 3, 4. The God 
of Israel is thought of as marching at the head of his people 
through the Arabian desert; before whom, therefore, as before 
other kings in like circumstances, a highway should be cast up ; 
mountains leveled; valleys filled; the crooked made straight and 
the rough smooth — for his march. " By his name Jah " — a con- 
traction for Jehovah, the earliest appearance of which is in the 
song of Moses and Miriam (Ex. 15 : 2). 

5. A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, 
is God in his holy habitation. 

6. God setteth the solitary in families : lie bringeth out 
those which are bound with chains : but the rebellious dwell 
in a dry land. 

To his high and perpetual glory, the God of Israel is the Kefuge 
and salvation of the needy and friendless. V. 6 applies this gen- 
eral principle to the special case of Israel brought forth from Egypt 
and ultimately planted in Canaan. " The solitary set in fam- 
ilies " are rather the lonely, the unbefriended and homeless ones, 
made to dwell in houses — the change of condition from Egypt to 
Canaan, and not as some have supposed, from a state of celibacy 
to the domestic condition of families. — —The middle clause of v. 6 
should be read — " The,captives he brought forth into prosperity," 



PSALM LXVIII. 



271 



with the same reference to Egyptian bondage, exchanged for the 
blessings of Canaan. The word which our translators made 
"chains" is now generally admitted to mean good fortune, all 

good things. " Only the rebellious abide in a sun-burnt land." 

For such and such only, God has no favors. 

7. O God, when thou wentest forth before thy people, 
when thou didst march through the wilderness ; Selah : 

8. The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the 
presence of God : even Sinai itself was moved at the presence 
of God, the God of Israel. 

Sublimely God is here thought of as marching in his pillar of 
cloud and fire at the head of his marshaled people from Egypt 
through the wilderness, manifesting his presence pre-eminently on 
Sinai. Then and there "the earth shook" (See Ex. 19: 16-18); 
" the heavens dripped" rather than " dropped " — the fearful thun- 
derings being at least conceived of as accompanied by rain as 

usual The original words, " this Sinai " [or " that Sinai "], are 

construed by some as a parenthesis — this was at Sinai; but by 
others supplying the verb "shook" from the beginning of the 
verse — which latter seems more in the line of thought, thus : Even 
that well known Mt. Sinai shook and trembled exceedingly — a fact 
which the records of Moses made very prominent. 

9. Thou, O God, didst send a plentiful rain, whereby 
thou didst confirm thine inheritance, when it was weary. 

Good critics are sharply divided on the question whether the 
two Hebrew words translated "plentiful rain" (literally a rain 
of abundance or a rain of free gifts) refer precisely to a great 
rain, or to a gracious bestowment of various blessings, e. g., Manna ; 
• quails ; water from the rock, etc. The connection shows that these 
were the blessings given the people in their wilderness life. The 
facts of the case therefore favor the latter construction, and so also 
does the fact that the verb for " send " is a sacrificial term, " wave" 
used continually of the " wave-offering." God waved over them 



Hebrew word for "plentiful" is a noun borrowed also from the 
sacrificial vocabulary — the free-will offerings. The fact that both 
these contiguous words suggest the sacrificial system strongly 

favors the construction above preferred. The Hebrew noun for 

rain * always means of itself a great rain, How often when God's 
people [his " inheritance "] were weary, did he refresh them, not 
precisely with rain, but with these various gifts of his miraculous 
hand ! 

10. Thy congregation hath dwelt therein : thou, O God, 
hast prepared of thy goodness for the poor. 

" Thy congregation " — a word quite unusual in this sense, mean- 




precious blessings. The 



272 



PSALM LXVIII. 



ing primarily a living animal; then, a flock; and here, God's flock, 
his chosen people of whom he was Shepherd. They have dwelt in 
it [Canaan] ; thou hast provided and wilt still in the same way for 
thy needy ones. The last verb is future, implying confidence in 
God's future and perpetual protection. 

11. The Lord gave the word : great was the company of 
those that published it. 

The thought of the poet is on the conquest of Canaan. " The 
Lord gave the word " — but this can not well be the word of com- 
mand for the battle, but rather the word of summons to the victor's 
song. I assume this from the suggestive words that follow — " the 
women who shouted the glad news were a great host." This is 
expressed by one Hebrew participle which is feminine, referring 
therefore to women ; it means, to proclaim glad tidings, and must 
mean here the glad tidings of victory. For the historic custom — 
women singing songs of victory, See Ex. 15: 20; Judg. 5 and 11: 

34, and 1 Sam. 18: 6, and 21 : 11, and 29; 5. Some points of 

the song follow. 

12. Kings of armies did flee apace : and she that tarried 
at home divided the spoil. 

Kings heading great armies [Hebrew hosts] fled; they fled; i. e.\ 
fled in consternation ; were completely routed. The matrons, re- 
maining securely at home shared the spoil — this being the usual 
custom when the rout was so entire that no enemy remained to be 
feared. 

13. Though ye have lain among the pots, yet shall ye be 
as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers 
with yellow gold. 

There seems to be not the least authority for the translation, 
" pots." The word occurs in Hebrew use in the sense of stalls for 
cattle, places provided for them to stand, sheltered securely. The 
word is here in the dual number, the sense being: When [after 
these great victories over the kings of Canaan] ye shall lie repos- 
ing among or between the stalls for your cattle, in the quiet of 
pastoral life, " ye shall be like the wings of a dove tipped with 
silver, and her feathers with the yellowness of gold" — silver and 
gold becoming suddenly abundant from the spoils of the conquered 
Canaanites. 

14. "When the Almighty scattered kings in it, it was 
white as snow in Salmon. 

The same "kings" referred to in v. 12, "scattered" in those 
fearful routes recorded Josh. 10 and 11. "In it" — the land of 

Canaan. "It snowed in Salmon" or Zalmon — a low mountain 

spoken of Judg. 9: 48, deeply wooded, -and therefore densely 
shaded, from which fact it takes its name. But as to the exact 



PSALM LXVJII. 



273 



import of these words, critics are divided, some suying: The 
change in your condition is like that when the brightness of snow 
blends with the deep shades of the forest ; others : the bleaching 
bones of the slain Canaanites are as snow on Zalmon. To the 
latter it might be objected that it takes time for the bones of 
slaughtered armies to assume this appearance. Also, that the 
context demands the sense of joy after sorrow, to the victorious 
Hebrews. 

15. The hill of God is as the hill of Bashan ; a high 
hill as the hill of Bashan. 

16. Why leap ye, ye high hills? this is the hill ivhich 
God desireth to dwell in ; yea, the Lord will dwell in it 
forever. 

God's hill can be no other than Zion — the hill God had chosen 
for his dwelling-place among his people. "Bashan," east of the 
Jordan, was physically loftier, more grand ; but still, the glory of 

God's presence on Zion made it surpass Mt. Bashan indefinitely. 

" An high hill " is more precisely a hill of lofty peaks, high head- 
lands. "Why leap ye ?" fails to give the sense of the Hebrew, 

which is : "Why do ye look askance, invidiously, ye higher mount- 
ains ? Why do ye envy Mt. Zion this rare distinction of being 
the chosen mount of God? It bears this honor, simply because 
God has chosen it (in the love of his heart for it, for the Hebrew 
word involves this thought); yea, Jehovah (not merely Elohim, 
but Jehovah), the covenant-keeping God of Israel, will make it his 
dwelling forever. Such transitions from the name Elohim to the 
name Lord (Jehovah), must not be attributed to chance or to a taste 
for variety. We must find the reason in its special significance 
as a name of God. 

17. The chariots of God are twenty thousand, even thou- 
sands of angels : the Lord is among them, as in Sinai, in 
the holy place. 

Those kings of Canaan were fully up to their times in the art 
of war. They were especially strong in war-chariots, of which 
Jabin of Hazor had nine hundred, iron-armed. See also Judg. 1 : 
19, and Josh. 11 : 4, 6, 9. The same was true of David's most 
powerful enemies (2 Sam. 8 : 4, and 10 : 18). Hence when the 
Poet-Psalmist would set forth the might of Jehovah as against 
them, he measures his power by his war-chariots — "two myriads; 
thousands repeated," i. e., re-duplicated indefinitely; and, more 
than all, the Jehovah in them, as at Sinai, the holy mountain. 
There_Js_no JSabr-ewLovoril here w hich can s u ggest t he ideaof 
<r angels. n The words used set forth the immense number~ofTiIs 
war-chariots — the object being to show that, in the point of their 

chief glory, he was infinitely above them. Angels seem to have 

been present in the scenes of Sinai (see Deut. 33 : 2, and Acts 7 : 



274 



PSALM LXVIII. 



53, Gal. 3 : 19, and Heb. 2 : 2), although the history given in Ex- 
odus omits to mention it. 

18. Thou hast ascended on high, thou hast led captivity- 
captive : thou hast received gifts for men ; yea, for the 
rebellious also, that the Lord God might dwell among 
them. 

After a great victory, the conquering king re'turns in pomp to 
his capital and throne ; with his captives and his spoils [here 
"gifts "] a portion of which he is wont to distribute among his 
most deserving officers and men. The phraseology here rests on 
this usage of ancient conquerors. The God of Israel, conqueror 
in these wars of Canaan, and last, in these closing wars of David's 
reign, now ascends to his throne on high; he leads his captives 
into captivity; he has received gifts among and even from rebels — 
gifts and presents made in pledge of their submission to his right- 
ful authority; so that now his dominion is re-established over 
them and he can dwell again among them — their recognized King 
and Lord. The giving of gifts to men, or receiving them for men, 
e. e., to be given to them, seems to be a secondary idea, not expli- 
citly involved in the words of the text here, but inferable from the 
usage of military conquerors. Paul (Eph. 4 : 8-12) finds here 
words which apply happily to the victory over Satan and sin, 
achieved by Jesus Christ in his death, and to his triumphant as- 
cension to his throne in the heavens, thenceforward to dispense 
among men the gifts of his grace and the gifts of its human 
instrumentalities as well. Without doubt the words apply well to 
these great facts in regard to Jesus Christ; but this falls short of 
proving this Psalm to be a prophecy of Christ. The great laws 
of God's administration over men are the same in each of these 
cases — a fact which sufficiently accounts for the facility with 
which the words of the earlier case apply also to the later. 

19. Blessed be the Lord, ivho daily loadeth us with benefits, 
even the God of our salvation. Selah. 

Critics differ as to the sense of the verb translated " loadeth." * 
The word occurs most frequently in the bad sense of imposing a 
burden. The original, moreover, has no word for "benefits." 
Some therefore construct thus : " Blessed be the Lord day by day; 
whoever imposes burdens, God is our salvation." Others, as our 
English version : " He who loads us every day " [with blessings] 
"is the God of our salvation." The latter seems to me the more 
easy and probable construction. 

20. He that is our God is the God of salvation ; and unto 
God the Lord belong the issues from death. 

21. But God shall wound the head of his enemies, and 



PSALM LXVIII. 



275 



the hairy scalp of such a one as goeth on still in his tres- 
passes. 

"The issues of death" — the goings forth from under his power. 
It is God's prerogative to bring his people up from the perils and 
power of death when he will — which is said here with special 
reference to the imminent perils of natural destruction from which 

God had preserved his people. " God shall wound the head," 

etc., but the Hebrew is stronger: shall crush or smite through and 
through. 

22. The Lord said, I will bring again from Bashan, I 
will bring my people again from the depths of the sea : 

23. That thy foot may be dipped in the blood of thine 
enemies, and the tongue of thy dogs in the same. 

What God will do with his enemies is the subject, both in v. 21 
and in v. 23, and therefore we can not -without violence make v. 22 
speak of God's people. The Hebrew has no word corresponding 
to "my people" as it stands in the English version. The senti- 
ment, therefore, must be — I, the Lord, will bring back thy fleeing 
and concealed enemies from the mountain fastnesses of Bashan or 
from the depths of the sea, that thou mayest utterly break their 
power. The supposition that God's enemies hide for fear of him 
in the depths of the sea appears again in Amos 9: 3: "Though 
they be hid from my sight in the bottom of the sea, thence will 

I command the serpent and he shall bite them." "That thou 

mayest stir thy foot in the blood of thine enemies and the tongue 
of thy dogs also" — which gives a strong view of their utterly sub- 
duing their foes, tramping their slain bodies beneath their feet. 
War has its scenes of horror; and when human war becomes the 
symbol of the judgments God brings on his persistent enemies, 
nothing less than scenes of appalling terror and woe can set forth 
the truth of the case. 

24. They have seen thy goings, O God ; even the goings 
of my God, my King, in the sanctuary. 

25. The singers went before, the players on instruments 
followed after ; among them were the damsels playing with 
timbrels. 

The "goings forth" of God here thought of are those in which 
he went forth at the head of the hosts of Israel, and by his provi- 
dential agencies, smote and subdued their enemies. Then he 
went forth from his sanctuary; these goings forth were fitly cele- 
brated in the sanctuary after the victory was won. TVe have the 
grand procession here in view ; the singers leading the train ; the 
instrumental performers next ; and all these in the midst of dam- 
sels playing the timbrel. This seems to be precisely what the 
Hebrew words mean; not that the damsels mingled among the 
other two classes, but that the other classes named were in the 



276 



PSALM LXVIII. 



center and the damsels in the outer circle. The custom of dam- 
sels beating the timbrel in joyous processions prevails still in the 
East. 

26. Bless ye God in the congregations, even the Lord, from 
the fountain of Israel. 

Bless God not only in your families and in your closets, but in 
the great congregation as here ; yea, bless your own Jehovah all 
ye who are of the fountain of Israel — the line of posterity being 
thought of as a stream issuing from a fountain ; Abraham and the 
patriarchs, the fountain-head ; and this great nation the outflowing 
waters therefrom. See similar figures Isaiah 48 : 1, and 51 : 1. 

27. There is little Benjamin ivith their ruler, the princes 
of Judah and their council, the princes of Zebulun, and the 
princes of Naphtali. 

Here the object seems to be to give vividness to the picture by 
specifying the leading tribes, first from the Southern part of the 
land; then from the Northern. Benjamin is "little" as being the 
youngest of the twelve sons of Jacob, yet his tribe furnished the 
first king (Saul), and his territory gave the site for the holy city. 

"There is little Benjamin, ruling them." The Hebrew word that 

follows "the princes of Judah" — standing, in our version, "and 
their council" — is difficult. Literally, it is, their stone-heap, which 
Dr. Alexander changes to "stoning them" with allusion to David's 
victory over Goliah. Others, dropping out the idea of stone, make 
it their troop, their host. May it not be akin to the use of " stone " 
in Gen. 49 : 24 — " From thence is the shepherd, the stone of Israel?" 

The rock is a common symbol of strength, firmness. The Sep- 

tuagint has it, Their leaders. 

28. Thy God hath commanded thy strength : strengthen, 
O God, that which thou hast wrought for us. 

God hath ordained that thou shouldest be strong; still, 0 God, 
make thy Avork wrought for us yet more strong — a prayer for more 
of the same divine aid through which they had conquered of old. 

29. Because of thy temple at Jerusalem shall kings bring 
presents unto thee. 

Because God had located his temple and earthly throne at 
Jerusalem, the kings of the nations should bring to that place their 
gifts in honor of his name. The same idea re-appears often in 
Isaiah (see 18: 7, and 49: 23, and 60: 5-13, and 66: 12). 

30. Kebuke the company of spearmen, the multitude of 
the bulls, with the calves of the people, till every one sub- 
mit himself with pieces of silver : scatter thou the people 
that delight in war. 

This is a prayer that God would overthrow their mightiest foes. 



PSALM LXVIIT. 



277 



"The company of spearmen" — better "the beast of the reeds," 
the wild beast, probably the crocodile who makes his home in the 
dense thicket of reeds along the river's shore ; said in reference to 

Egypt, more than once symbolized by its crocodile. "Bulls" — 

mighty men, princes. "With calves" fills out the picture by 
suggesting their subordinates — including therefore _ the leaders 
and the led ; the captains and their men, making their submission 
with tribute money. — — The last clause is not a prayer, but a 
prophecy, built on history : Thou hast scattered the war-loving na- 
tion, and thou wilt yet again. 

31. Princes shall come out of Egypt; Ethiopia shall soon 
stretch out her hands unto God. 

"Princes;" literally, the fat, rich ones; but in the sense of 

Srinces, men first in power. They shall come out of Egypt to 
erusalem as promised above (v. 29) to bring thither their offer- 
ings to the true God. So Isaiah (19: 21, 22). Ethiopia shall 

hasten her hands toward God ; literally, make them run. Lifting 
up the hands to God is with the Psalmist an act of worship, yet 
probably in this connection involving the presentation of her gifts 
to the God of Israel. 

32. Sing unto God, ye kingdoms of the earth; O sing 
praises unto the Lord ; Selah : 

33. To him that rideth upon the heavens of heavens, 
ivJiich were of old ; lo, he doth send out his voice, and tliat 
a mighty voice. 

Inspired by this prophetic scene, the Psalmist calls on all the 
kingdoms of the earth to sing the praises of the mighty God who 
rideth in state upon the heaven of heavens — the summit of the 
ancient heavens ; higher than which no words of man can express 
or imagination conceive. A God so great and glorious justly com- 
mands the homage of the wide world. It is in his eternal purpose 
to secure in due time the universal homage of the nations. 

34. Ascribe ye strength unto God : his excellency is over 
Israel, and his strength is in the clouds. 

35. O God, thou art terrible out of thy holy places : the 
God of Israel is he that giveth strength and power unto 
his people. Blessed be God. 

Acknowledge his infinite power; recognize it with your highest 
praises. His excellent majesty rests upon Israel, in the sense of 
being displayed in her salvation. Then in sublimest words the 
song closes with ascriptions of highest glory and power to the God 
of Israel. Think of this Psalm as sung by the vast choir of the 
temple, sustained by players on instruments and damsels beating 
timbrels and many thousand hearts and voices in the grand con- 
cert—was it not magnificent? May we not hope it had an in- 
spiring power to impress the masses with these sublime and glo- 



278 



PSALM LXIX. 



rious truths pertaining to the God of their salvation, the High and 
Lofty One whose throne they thought of as in the heaven of 
heavens and yet whose dwelling-place was also within their sacred 
tent — a visible Glory upon the ark of the covenant ? 

PSALM LXIX. 

The caption ascribes this Psalm to David, with the addition of 
the words "Upon Shoshannim; " which we have seen at the head 
of Ps. 45 and 60. The common significance of these words — 
" upon [or concerning] lilies," seems less appropriate here than in 
the other Psalms. It must be admitted that obscurity rests on 
some, not to say many, of these Hebrew phrases which appear in 

the captions to the Psalms. In this Psalm a sufferer sets forth 

his own case — a sufferer who is religious, prayerful, in sympathy 
with God, and suffering in part at least because he is godly, yet 
one who confesses his sin (v. 5). He dwells on the reproaches 
cast upon him, implores God's interposing arm for his deliverance ; 
prays that righteous retribution may come upon the common ene- 
mies of himself and of his God; and rejoices in the assurance 
that God will hear his prayer, vindicate his own cause and that 

of his servant, and remember his Zion to befriend his people. 

At this stage it should be noted that several phrases which occur in 
this Psalm are applied in the New Testament to Christ and to 
points in his history — e. g., v. 4, "They that hate me without a 

cause," in Jn. 15: 25; v. 9, "The zeal of thine house hath 

eaten me up," in Jn. 2: 17. The last clause of the same verse, 
" The reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon 

me," is applied to Christ by Paul (Rom. 15 : 3). Also with v. 

21. " In my thirst thev cave me vinegar to drink," compare Matt. 
27 : 34, 48 and John 19 : 28, 29; and with v. 25 : "Let their habi- 
tation be desolate," compare Ac. 1: 20. In view of these quo- 
tations and allusions we have three distinct theories of construc- 
tion for this Psalm, between which to make our choice : (1) That 
these are the words of the historic David writing primarily and 
properly of himself, giving his own experience under his cir- 
cumstances at some certain point of his history; or (2) of David 
describing an ideal sufferer, and therefore purposely saying things 
which may apply in general to all Christian sufferers in such a 
world as this, and perhaps pre-eminently to Christ, their great rep- 
resentative ; or (3) of David carrying along in his mind both his 
own case, and by the inspiration of prophecy, that of Christ, say- 
ing some things which apply to himself only; other things appli- 
cable to Christ only; and yet other things equally applicable to 

both. All these theories have their advocates. In my view the 

first is encumbered with far less difficulty than either the second 
or the third. To the second the great objection is that it is unnat- 
ural — a way of writing that nobody uses, and therefore a theory 



PSALM LXIX. 



279 



which critics can reasonably adopt only when nothing else can be 
found to meet the emergency. The third is most uncomfortably 
vague and uncertain, requiring indeed a second revelation to show 
what the revelation in this Psalm means ; and therefore should in 

my view be rejected. The first theory — that these are words of 

the historic David, said properly of himself—harmonizes without 
difficulty with the quotations above referred to on the principle 
of words borrowed from this Psalm because they fitly expressed 
the ideas which the New Testament writers wished to express. 
In some of these cases it is obvious that what. they saw in Christ 
simply suggested the words of this Psalm. Thus* when Jesus so 
resolutely drove out the traffickers from the temple, his disciples 
remembered that it was written, " The zeal of thine house hath 
eaten me up." His case suggested these words, not necessarily as 
a prophecy, but as appropriate. This principle covers all the 
other cases in this Psalm, and therefore leaves none which we 
are compelled to regard as real prophecy, referring to Jesus Christ 

in its primary and proper sense. Fatally against the theory 

that would make this entire Psalm refer to Christ is the confes- 
sion of "folly" and "guilt" (v. 5). Assuming that the historic 

David speaks here, we have only to inquire of what period in his 
personal history he is speaking. The Psalm itself lacks very pos- 
itive indications. Its place however, near the close of this second 
of the five original books of the Psalms, contiguous to Ps. 70 
which is essentially the latter portion of Ps. 40 ; and to Ps. 71 
which beyond all question belongs to the old age of David, renders 
it highly probable that the date falls within his last scene of 
trial, viz., that from the conspiracy of Adonijah. This view is 
still strengthened by the similar location of Psalms pertaining to 
the same period just at the close of the first book. See prelimi- 
nary Notes on Ps. 38: 39, and 41. The first book of Psalms 
(1—41) being made-up almost if not quite exclusively of Psalms 
written by David, and the second book (Ps. 42-72) chiefly of his, 
nothing could be more natural than for the compilers to place at 
the close of each a cluster of Psalms pertaining to that latest 
scene of his earthly trials- — perhaps the last, or nearly the last 
Psalms he ever wrote. I therefore accept this as the date of Ps. 
69 and 71. See particularly the Notes introductory to Ps. 39. 

1. Save me, O God ; for the waters are come in unto my 
soul. 

2. I sink in deep mire, where there is no standing : I am 
come into deep waters, where the floods overflow me. 

The figures are plain, almost homely, but exceedingly expressive ; 
sinking in deep water of miry bottom, imperiling his very life. 
Such was his feeling and such apparently the facts of his case 
when that last conspiracy broke upon him, already almost sinking 
under the infirmities of age and perhaps sickness. 



280 



PSALM LXIX. 



3. I am weary of my crying : my throat is dried : mine 
eyes fail while I wait for my God. 

4. They that hate me without a cause are more than the 
hairs of mine head : they that would destroy me, being mine 
enemies wrongfully, are mighty : then I restored that which 
I took not away. 

Worn out with crying ; his throat hot, inflamed ; his eyes grow- 
ing dim with tears and long waiting with no answer from his 

God — was not his case sad in the extreme? Whatever might 

be true of David's other enemies, these men, Adonijah, Joab, 
Abiathar, had no ground for this heartless uprising against a 
father and an old and most worthy friend. It was terribly cruel 
upon the heart of the venerable David that they should now con- 
spire to wrest away from him at once his throne and his life. He 
had done more for them than they could reasonably claim — 
equivalent to restoring what he never took from them. 

5. O God, thou knowest my foolishness ; and my sins are 
not hid from thee. 

As toward God, he had no such claim of being sinless, and 
afflicted without cause. He remembered but too bitterly the 
scenes associated with Uriah and Bathsheba, and it did not sur- 
prise him that God should remember against him that folly and 
that guilt. 

6. Let not them that wait on thee, O Lord God of hosts, 
be ashamed for my sake : let not those that seek thee be 
confounded for my sake, O God of Israel. 

7. Because for thy sake I have borne reproach; shame 
hath covered my face. 

But now David is one of those who wait on God for his mercy 
and in a measure represents this class. Out of this fact he draws 
an argument; on it he builds his plea that God would in very deed 
hear and save. 0 God, have mercy on me, lest, otherwise, those 
that wait on thee as I now do, become discouraged and even con- 
founded. They will say — If God will not hear David's prayer, how 

can we hope he will ever hear ours ? This is also a strong point 

in David's case: "I have suffered, O Lord, for thy sake; I have 
borne reproach because I have stood by Thee. Now if Thou cast 
me off, Avhat wilt thou do for thy great name ? " 

8. I am become a stranger unto my brethren, and an 
alien unto my mother's children. 

9. For the zeal of thine house hath eaten me up ; and the 
reproaches of them that reproached thee are fallen upon 
me. 

May we suppose that David here alludes tacitly to the tart 



PSALM LXIX. 



281 



rebuke from his elder brother Eliab on that eventful day when his 
faith in Israel's God first blazed out before the armies of Israel ? 
(1 Sam. 17 : 28); and perhaps also to the rebuff from his own wife 
Michal, Saul's daughter, when she saw King David leaping and 
dancing before the Lord with exuberant joy and "despised him 
in her heart," and taunted him in a most cutting way with her 
tongue? (2 Sam. 6 : 16-23). "We may certainly suppose that these 
cases do not exhaust the list, but are rather specimens of the 
reproaches that fell on him often for daring to stand out so fully 
and so fearlessly for God before godless men and women, void of 

all sympathy with his heart or with Israel's God. " The zeal of 

thine house," i. e., zeal for thine house — a zealous regard and an 
intense love for the worship and the honor of thy temple have 
absorbed my strength and consumed my life-forces. It is suppos- 
able that David's mind is in part at least upon his intense and long 
cherished desire to build a temple for God in Jerusalem ; for which 
indeed he did make immense preparations ; but which God did not 
permit him personally to erect. (See 2 Sam. 7, and 1 Chron. 22, 
and 28, and 29). — The earnest zeal of Jesus manifested in driving 
out those that sold and bought in the temple, suggested to the 
disciples these very apposite words from this Psalm of David, 
(John 2: 17). 

10. When I wept, and chastened my soul with fastiDg, 
that was to my reproach. 

11. I made sackcloth also my garment ; and I became a 
proverb to them. 

12. They that sit in the gate speak against me ; and I was 
the song of the drunkards. 

There being no Hebrew words answering to " and chastened" 
we may translate the actual words of the text: " And then I wept 
away my soul [or life] with fasting, and this became a reproach 
to me." The godless Eliabs and Michals may have reproached 
David not only for his zeal and faith toward God, but also for his 
grief and sorrow under trials and under the consciousness of per- 
sonal guilt. " They that sit in the gate " — either magistrates or 

simply the men of leisure, news-mongers; probably the latter. 
Oriental custom made the gates of the city the place of general 
resort for gossips of the male sex. 

13. But as for me, my prayer is unto thee, O Lord, in 
an acceptable time : O God, in the multitude of thy mercy 
hear me, in the truth of thy salvation. 

1-1. Deliver me out of the mire, and let me not sink : let 
me be delivered from them that hate me, and out of the 
deep waters. 

15. Let not the water-flood overflow me, neither let the 



282 



PSALM LXIX. 



deep swallow me up, and let not the pit shut her mouth 
upon me. 

The words (v. 14), "deliver me from tbem that hate me," seem 
to show that the calamities indicated by " deep waters/' "water- 
floods," " the deep," " the pit," etc., were precisely those brought 
upon him by personal, malign enemies, e. g., Adonijah and those 
whom he drew into his schemes of treason. 

16. Hear me, O Lord ; for thy loving-kindness is good : 
turn unto me according to the multitude of thy tender 
mercies. 

17. And hide not thy face from thy servant ; for I am 
in trouble : hear me speedily. 

18. Draw nigh unto my soul, and redeem it : deliver me 
because of mine enemies. 

It is at once noticeable and refreshing that under the pressure 
of these calamities David seems to think first of all of prayer, 
help from his God in his deep trouble. The first thing to be done 
is to cry to God; all else is comparatively unimportant. If God 
be for him, all will be well; without God, all else must utterly 
fail. His heart as well as his philosophy and his practical wisdom 
determined the bent of his soul toward God for help. 

19. Thou hast known my reproach, and my shame, and 
my dishonor : mine adversaries are all before thee. 

20. Reproach hath broken my heart ; and I am full of 
heaviness : and I looked for some to take pity, but there was 
none ; and for comforters, but I found none. 

It was his comfort that God knew his whole case — knew every 

one of his enemies and all their wickedness toward him.- When 

he looked around for sympathy and help, he found none. Proba- 
bly we need not take this statement in its strongest, most absolute 
sense, for so understood, it is scarcely credible; but rather in the 
sense — no adequate helpers — no comforters who can truly meet the 
wants of my soul. The words had their legitimate sense remark- 
ably met in the case of Jesus when all his disciples forsook him 
and fled (Matt. 26: 56); when the selected three slept more than 
prayed with their master in the agony of Gethsemanc, and the 
most pronounced friend in the chosen twelve denied him. 

21. They gave me also gall for my meat; and in my 
thirst they gave me vinegar to drink. 

As said by David of himself, these words are probably figurative. 
"Gall"* — bitter, and generally thought poisonous. These were 
most unpalatable as well as unsuitable articles for either food or 



PSALM LXIX. 



283 



drink. It W as customary to give the sufferer under crucifixion 

certain medicinal drinks to abate the acutencss of his pain. In 
the case of our Lord, Matthew (27: 34) says: "They gave him 
vinegar mingled with gall; " while Mark (15: 13) has it: w Wine 
mingled with myrrh "—a case of different words for the same thing. 
As done by the Roman soldiers, the purpose was humane, and 
neither cruel nor insulting; but as parts of the entire process of 
crncifixion, and as instigated by the murderous Jews, the spirit 
was the same which appears here — a case therefore of coinci- 
dence. 

22. Let their table become a snare before them : and 
that which should have been for their welfare, let it become a 
trap. 

23. Let their eyes be darkened, that they see not ; and 
make their loins continually to shake. 

24. Pour out thine indignation upon them, and let thy 
wrathful anger take hold of them. 

25. Let their habitation be desolate ; and let none dwell 
in their tents. 

V. 22 seems to be, as to expression and figure, an outgrowth 
of v. 21. As they have abused and outraged me at my table, so 

let their table be to them a snare — retribution in kind. The last 

clause of v. 22 is simply: "And to them, secure, a trap; " i. e., 
while supposing themselves secure from danger, let their own table 
ensnare them fatally. The rest of the language here is plain. 
The moral relations of the passage will be considered below, on 
vs. 27, 28. 

26. For they persecute Mm whom thou hast smitten ; and 
they talk to the grief of those whom thou hast wounded. 

The cruel thing to David was that while he was suffering de- 
served chastisement for his sins from the hand of God, his enemies 
took advantage of his distress to taunt, persecute, and destroy 

him. " Talk to the grief" — so talk as to aggravate the grief, etc. 

So Shimei cursed him just at the point when his soul was most 
bitterly tried with the cruel treason of Absalom. Adonijah took 
a similar advantage of his father's infirmities of age and sickness. 

27. Add iniquity unto their iniquity : and let them not 
come into thy righteousness. 

28. Let them be blotted out of the book of the living, 
and not be written with the righteous. 

The meaning here is not: Make them more wicked; lead them 
on to greater and yet greater sin ; but this : Inflict punishment 
for their sin, the same word being used both for sin and for its 
punishment, in the sense : Give them for their sin the punishment 



284 



PSALM LXIX. 



due to sin; literally, it is: Give punishment upon their sin. 

" Let them not come into thy righteousness " is : Let them find no 

forgiveness ; let them not be accepted by thee as righteous. 

"The book of the living" conceives of a record or register which 
contains the names of the living, but from which the names of the 
dead are stricken off. Thus Moses (Ex. 32 : 32) prays : 44 Blot me 
out of thy book which thou hast written." This usage — a natural 
outgrowth of the earliest use of writing, viz., for geneological pur- 
poses, came to be applied to a record or register of the righteous, 
a book of life, as the list of those who were in favor with God. 
(Phil. 4: 3, and Rev. 3: 5, and 13: 8, and 20: 12, and 21: 27.) 

It remains now to consider the often vexed question of the 
imprecatory Psalms. What is their moral character t 

The following few and simple points will bring us to the just 

solution of this question. (1) Is it right for God to punish the 

wicked with just retribution for their sin, in either this world or 
the next, or in both, according to his wisdom? (2) Can he do 
this benevolently, without the least malign feeling toward the sinner, 
but purely for the highest good of his universe ? (3) Is it mor- 
ally right for his people to sympathize with him in his views of 
the wisdom, the necessity, and therefore the desirableness of such 
retribution ? (4) Is it possible for his people to do this benevo- 
lently, with no blending of malign purpose or emotion, for the 

same reason that God does ? In my view the affirmative in each 

of these questions must be true, and is indeed in ethics self-evident, 

and therefore too plain to be made more so by any argument. 

The case admits of collateral support, e. g., from evidence in the 
case of David toward Saul, which shows plainly that while he by 
no means exempts Saul from his prayers for retribution on the 
wicked, he yet bore in his heart the kindest and most benevolent 
feeling toward him. 

29. But I am poor and sorrowful : let thy salvation, O 
God, set me up on high. 

30. I will praise the name of God with a song, and will 
magnify him with thanksgiving. 

31. TJiis also shall please the Lord better than an ox or 
bullock that hath horns and hoofs. 

"Poor," as most commonly in the case of this Hebrew word, is 

not pennyless, but frail, weak, and afflicted. " Set me up on 

high" — a military phrase, meaning above these dangers — lifted out 

from the depth of affliction. The grateful thanks of the heart 

are more pleasing to God than the heartless offering of ox or 
bullock, horned and hoofed — these descriptive points making a 
palpable contrast between the grateful love of the heart and the 

mere offering of horned cattle. It is supposable that David 

alludes here to the facts of the history (1 Kings 1 : 19) : " Adoni- 
jah slew sheep and oxen and fat cattle by the stone of Zoheleth 



PSALM LXX. 



285 



and called all his brethren," etc. It is not said how much or how 
little of religious worship may have been meant or professed in 
this slaughter of animals, but probably he sought to strengthen 
himself by at least the show of worshiping God. David had no 
fear that he would make capital for himself by really pleasing 
God. 

32. The humble shall see this, and be glad : and your 
hearts shall live that seek God. 

33. For the Lokd heareth the poor, and despiseth not 
his prisoners. 

" The humble "—a Hebrew word closely akin to the word " poor" 

in v. 29. "Your heart shall live" — i. e., in real life, joy, 

and peace, sustained and prolonged, such as no word can express 
more perfectly than life. See Ps. 22: 26, and Heb. 12: 9. 

34. Let the heaven and earth praise him, the seas and 
every thing that moveth therein. 

35. For God will save Zion, and will build the cities of 
Judah : that they may dwell there, and have it in posses- 
sion. 

36. The seed also of his servants shall inherit it : and 
they that love his name shall dwell therein. 

Lifted by faith above all fear, and joyful in the fresh salvation 
which the Lord had given him over this last combination of ene- 
mies to crush him, he calls on the heavens and the earth to praise 
God and exult with himself in the assurance that God will save 
Zion and make her prosperity both permanent and glorious. Such 
a succession of delivering mercies as God had manifested to David 
through all his life prepared him to die with the unfaltering 
assurance of God's everlasting love and faithfulness to his Zion, 
and consequently of the future glory of God's earthly kingdom. 

PSALM LXX. 

The caption commits the Psalm to the choir-leader; ascribes it 
to David, and subjoins, "to bring to remembrance," which stands 

also at the head of Ps. 38. See notes on this phrase there. 

This short Psalm repeats almost verbatim the last portion of Ps. 
40; i. e., vs. 13-17. It also stands in very close relations to Ps. 69 
which precedes, and Ps. 71, following, a continuation of the former 
and a preface to the latter. It will be remembered also that Ps. 
38-41 which close the first book of Psalms have points of very 
close analogy with Ps. 69-71 which [with the exception of Ps. 72 
from Solomon] close the second book. We have seen strong rea- 
sons for assigning them all to the closing years of David's life, the 
13 



286 



PSALM LXXI. 



calamities under which he suffers being those of a feeble and 
probably diseased old age, coupled -with the conspiracy of Adoni- 

jah. This short Psalm is therefore appropriate to its place in 

the collection. It seems most reasonable to regard it as a distinct 
composition, and to account for its close resemblance to Ps. 40: 
13-17 by the fact that it was composed near the same time and in 
view of substantially the same external circumstances. 

1. Make haste, O God, to deliver me ; make haste to help 
me, O Lord. 

Here we have Elohim [God] in place of Jehovah as in Ps. 40 : 
13. The other differences are unimportant. This may have been 
made simply for variety. 

2. Let them be ashamed and confounded that seek after 
my soul : let them be turned backward, and put to confusion, 
that desire my hurt. 

3. Let them be turned back for a reward of their shame 
that say, Aha, aha. 

The cruel and heartless treason of Adonijah repeated the sin of 
Absalom under even more aggravated circumstances because his 
father was now sick and broken with the weight of years, trials, 
and sufferings. There was therefore the utmost pertinence in this 
prayer that those who thus sought his life might be frustrated and 
broken down in their infamous endeavors. It was a horrible 
outrage on all propriety that a son, instead of revering a father so 
worthy of his reverence, should treat him with sovereign contempt 
The justice of God and the interests of society demanded swift 
retribution for such outrageous wrong. 

4. Let all those that seek thee rejoice and be glad in 
thee : and let such as love thy salvation say continually, 
Let God be magnified. 

5. But I am poor and needy ; make haste unto me, O 
God : thou art my help and my deliverer ; O Lord, make 
no tarrying. 

Let those who seek thee never have occasion to mourn because 
they find no help, but seek in vain. Let this be true of all this 
class, as of me also. I need thy help; need it now: O let this 
help come without delay! 

PSALM LXXI. 

The compilers put nothing at the head of this Psalm — a fact 
which indicates that they held it to be a continuation o£ the one 
preceding. Its special points strongly confirm the opinion already 
expressed in the preliminary remarks on Ps. 69 and 70, viz. : that 



PSALM LXXI. 



287 



it dates near the close of David's life, and was occasioned by the 
conspiracy of Adonijah. The allusions to his old age are remark- 
ably full and explicit (vs. 5, 6, 9, 17, 18). 

1. In thee, O Lord, do I put my trust : let me never be 
put to confusion. 

2. Deliver me in thy righteousness, and cause me to 
escape : incline thine ear unto me, and save me. 

" Have I put my trust" [preter tense] all my long life; let mo 
never, even to the end of my days, be put to confusion, disap- 
pointed in my expectation of help from my God in every emerg- 
ency. "Deliver me in thy righteousness," for righteousness de- 
mands the fulfillment of thy promises. 

3. Be thou my strong habitation, whereunto I may con- 
tinually resort : thou hast given commandment to save me ; 
for thou art my rock and my fortress. 

4. Deliver me, O my God, out of the hand of the wicked, 
out of the hand of the unrighteous and cruel man. 

"My strong habitation" — literally, a rock of a dwelling-place — 
a place of abode strong like a rock. These military ideas come 
of course from the usages of those times. The fastnesses of the 
rocks were often places of secure retreat and concealment; the 
lofty crags were natural castles of strength against the military 
weapons of that age. " Deliver me out of the hand of the un- 
righteous and cruel man ; for surely thy sense of justice and the 
benevolence of thy heart will demand this. Thou seest the cruel 
wrongs they perpetrate upon me ; let thine indignation be roused 
against such wickedness. 

5. For thou art my hope, O Lord God: thou art my 
trust from my youth. 

6. By thee have I been holden up from the womb : thou 
art he that took me out of my mother's bowels : my praise 
shall be continually of thee. 

Eefreshing beyond measure it must have been to David to recall 
the long years of his experience through a life of sweet trust in 
God, running even from his youth, back beyond that eventful visit 
of Samuel (1 Sam. 16 : 1-13) which called him in from his flock 
and put the anointing oil of royalty upon his head. Indeed he 
recognized God's hand upon him for good even from his birth. 
All along, his God had been theme of his songs of praise, and 
should be continually. 

7. I am as a wonder unto many ; but thou art my strong 
refuge. 

" I am as a wonder to many "—of which Dr. Alexander says— "as 
a prodigy, a wonder, an object of contemptuous astonishment," The 



288 



PSALM LXXI. 



Hebrew word however seems to suggest simply surprise, wonder, and 
not necessarily contempt. The providences of God toward David had 
been wonderful, striking ; the exigencies through which he passed 
were extraordinary and might well attract the profound attention 

of many. In the end God had always proved to be his refuge — 

had brought him safely and triumphantly through. 

8. Let my mouth be filled with thy praise and with thy 
honor all the day. 

This verse is in form precisely future and not imperative. " My 
mouth shall be filled; " so it should be, and this is the full purpose 
of my heart. 

9. Cast me not off in the time of old age ; forsake me not 
when my strength faileth. 

10. For mine enemies speak against me ; and they that 
lay wait for my soul take counsel together, 

11. Saying, God hath forsaken him; persecute and take 
him ; for there is none to deliver him. 

This was strong pleading, and his faithful God could not fail to 
hear such prayer. Though conscious of many imperfections, 
David still had a clear assurance that in the main he had sought 
to please God and to do his will. This assurance was now a foun 
tain of strength to his soul as he came before God. 

12. O God, be not far from me : O my God, make haste 
for my help. 

13. Let them be confounded and consumed that are 
adversaries to my soul ; let them be covered with reproach 
and dishonor that seek my hurt. 

These verses are in the strain of Ps. 70 : 1,2. 

14. But I will hope continually, and will yet praise thee 
more and more. 

15. My mouth shall show forth thy righteousness and thy 
salvation all the day ; for I know not the numbers thereof. 

I will never cease to hope, and I will even heighten my praises 
of thee : more and more will I praise thee for thine ever growing 

mercies. " I know not the numbers thereof; " I can not express 

all thou has done that is worthy of praise ; there is more than I 
can tell. The word for "numbers" has the sense of recounting, 
enumerating. I know not how to count them up. 

16. I will go in the strength of the Lord God : I will 
make mention of thy righteousness, even of thine only. 

"I will go in the strength of the Lord God" should naturally 
mean — I will pursue my path-way of life in his strength. This 
sentiment is unobjectionable, but the original word seems not to 



PSALM LXXI. 



289 



be used in this way. This verb " go " * means to enter into, or to 
go doivn as the sun at night, but never to travel one's life-course. 
It is better therefore to assume a reference to going into the sanc- 
tuary for worship — this verb being often used for such going. 
(See Ps. 5 : 7, and 66 : 13). That he speaks of doing this in God's 
strength is due to his great physical weakness and his sense of 
inability even to go into the sanctuary save as the Lord should 

revive and restore his physical vigor. Upborne of God, so as to 

reach once more the sanctuary I love, I will speak of thy righteous- 
ness and of thine only; not a word of my own; of nothing else 
but the goodness of my God and his divine equity as between me 
and my enemies. 

17. O God, thou hast taught me from my youth : and 
hitherto have I declared thy wondrous works. 

18. Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, 
forsake me not : until I have showed thy strength unto this 
generation, and thy power to every one that is to come. 

" Taught," instructed me not by thy word only or chiefly, but by 
thy works, preserving me from danger and guiding my steps. 
His thought seems to be especially upon God's wonderful works of 

providence toward him throughout his life. Now that he is old, 

trail, physically almost powerless, he needs the upholding hand of 
his God more than ever, and he longs to fill out the same course 

of testimony for God to the very end of life. " Forsake me not ; " 

uphold me still until I have testified in behalf of thy sustaining 
arm to all future generations. 

19. Thy righteousness also, O God, is very high, who 
hast done great things : O God, who is like unto thee ! 

"Righteousness," here, as often, is goodness with some promi- 
nence to the idea of justice as between himself and his enemies. 

"Very high;" literally, unto the height, i. e., of heaven — a 

common Hebrew phraee to express the highest conceivable great- 
ness. So Ps. 57 : 10 : " For thy mercy is great unto the heavens and 
thy truth reacheth unto the clouds." No other being can compare 
with God : all the gods of the heathen are nothing before him. 

20. Thou, which hast showed me great and sore troubles, 
shalt quicken me again, and shalt bring me up again from 
the depths of the earth. 

In both instances the word for " again " is the Hebrew verb 
return : # Thou wilt return and revive ; return and bring me up. The 
Psalmist gives prominence to the idea of a special interposition of 

God — a coming back to manifest his love and power. " From 

the depth of the earth " is not here the grave, but the deep waters — 
a figure for extreme depression, weakness ; perhaps with allusion 



290 



PSALM LXXIL 



to the waters of the deluge, to which this word is repeatedly 
applied. 

21. Thou slialt increase my greatness, and comfort me on 
every side. 

" Greatness " — probably in the sense of dignity as king upon thy 
throne. So far from suffering my glory to be eclipsed and its sun 
to set in the blood of treason, thou wilt give me fresh proofs of thy 

favor and of thy power to save. " Comfort me on every side : ' 

is put with equal strength and beauty; Thou wilt pass ail round 
about me and comfort me ; look carefully to my whole case with 
the purpose to do the utmost possible to fill my soul with consola- 
tion. 

22. I will also praise thee with the psaltery, even thy 
truth, O my God : unto thee will I sing with the harp, O 
thou Holy One of Israel. 

23. My lips shall greatly rejoice when I sing unto thee ; 
and my soul, which thou hast redeemed. 

24. My tongue also shall talk of thy righteousness all the 
day long : for they are confounded, for they are brought 
unto shame, that seek my hurt. 

It heightens the beauty of this scene that " the sweet Psalmist " 
is now "old and gray-headed." Yet the fire of love in his soul 
burns brightly ; the spirit of praise and of song is yet in its 
strength ; and these last strains of his pen and tongue are still 
fresh with the dew of his youth and rich also in the ripeness of 
hoary age. Who can doubt that such a life, closing in such a 
death, opens out into a songful and glorious immortality? When will 
David ever cease to bear his testimony in grateful, adoring praises 
to the redeeming mercy and enduring faithfulness of his God ! 

~>XKoo 

PSALM LXXII. 

The two preliminary questions of prime concern are: (a) Who 
lurotethis Psalm f (b) Of whom does it speak ? 

(a) As to the author opinions are divided between David and 
Solomon. I accept the theory that Solomon is the author on the 

following grounds. (1) The Psalm is ascribed to him in the 

caption in the same way in which all the Psalms, supposed to be 
written by David are ascribed to him, viz., with the Hebrew prepo- 
sition Lamed * meaning [ascribed] to Solomon. In the absence 
of any strong counter-evidence, this ought certainly to be decisive. 

Since some may at first view suppose that v. 20 is such 

counter-evidence, it should be said — This verse is not a part of Ps. 



PSALM LXXII. 



291 



72, but is put, independently of this Psalm, at the close of the 
second book of Psalms. Ps. 72 closes with the double doxology, 
"Amen and Amen," substantially as each closing Psalm in the sev- 
eral separate books of Psalms ends. See Ps. 41 : 13. "Blessed be 
the Lord God of Israel from everlasting to everlasting. Amen and 
Amen." Here: "Blessed be the Lord God, the God of Israel; 
Amen and Amen;" and Ps. 89: 52, essentially the same; also 
Ps. 106 : 48. This uniformity in the manner of closing the sev- 
eral books shows plainly that this Ps. 72 closes with v. 19. The 
compilers added v. 20, not to the 72d Psalm but to the second book 
of Psalms because they supposed they had now brought in the 

last of the Psalms of David. (2) In respect to drapery and 

costume this Psalm comes from the peaceful reign of Solomon, 
just as Ps. 2 and 110 come from the warlike reign of David. As 
the key-note of the latter is war and conquest, so the key-note of 
this is peace and its normal blessings. As the spirit of prophecy 
drew the painting in Ps. 2 and 110 from the reign of David and 
naturally spake to him in figures and images with which his 
whole life-experience had been familiar, so was the case with this 
Ps. 72 ; the Spirit spake to Solomon in terms and figures most in 
harmony with the grand idea of his reign. Or, to come yet more 
close to the true conception, assuming that the Messiah is the 
theme in all these three Psalms, he is put before David's mind as 

a second David ; before Solomon's mind as a second Solomon. 

(3) Some of the specific allusions in this Psalm strongly favor if 
they do not even demand the theory that the date of "the writing 
was during the reign of Solomon, and therefore that he and not 
David was the author. Of these are v. 10 : " The kings of Tar- 
shish and of the Isles shall bring presents " [people unknown to 
the history of David] ; " the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer 
gifts ; " facts which appear precisely in the history of Solomon, 
but not of David. The wide extent of this king's reign* (v. 8) 
comes in idea from the reign of Solomon and not of David. (4) 
The Chaldean Paraphrast, very ancient authority as to the cur- 
rent opinon of the Jews on this question, paraphrases the cap- 
tion "To Solomon," "spoken prophetically through Solomon." 

(6.) The second preliminary question — Of whom? — is readily 
answered. A greater than Solomon is here. Solomon may be 
said to stand in the foreground, in the sense that the imagery is 
borrowed from him and from his reign, but the glory of this person- 
age is far above that of Solomon; the extent of his dominion is 
greater ; its duration indefinitely longer ; its blessedness to his sub- 
jects far more deep, rich, abiding. The voice of the most re- 
mote antiquity assigns this Psalm to the Messiah. The Chaldean 
Paraphrast expands v. 1, thus : " O God, give the decrees of thy 
judgments to King Messiah." Jarchi, on v. 16, says : " The ancient 
doctors explained these words of the times of the Messiah, and 
indeed the whole Psalm concerning King Messiah." On this 



292 



PSALM LXXTT. 



point al] the early Christian expositors concur with the early 
Jewish doctors. 

1. Give the king thy judgments, O God, and thy right- 
eousness unto the king's son. 

2. He shall judge thy people with righteousness, and thy 
poor with judgment. 

It is refreshing to trace the spirit of these verses hack to those 
noblest utterances of David, found among his last words (2 Sam. 
23: 2, 3): "The Spirit of the Lord spake by me and his word 
was in my tongue; the God of Israel said — '■He that ruleth over 
men must be just, ruling in the fear of God. 1 " We find the same 
ideas inwrought as deep convictions in the mind of. Solomon; for 
when God said, "Ask what I shall give thee." he answered, "Give 
thy servant an understanding heart to judge thy people, that I may 
discern between good and bad; for who is able to judge this thy 
so great people? " So the Spirit of inspiration indites this prayer 
which is really a prophecy : " Give to thy Great King Messiah 
thy judgments, 0 God, that he may judge thy people with righteous- 
ness and thy poor with judgment" — justice. Isaiah (11: 1-3) 
takes up this strain of thought: "The Spirit of the Lord shall rest 
upon him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of 
counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and of the fear of 
the Lord.". "With righteousness shall he judge the poor," etc. 
And therefore, because he does judge and administer, both providen- 
tially and morally from God's throne, with infinite justice and perfect 
equity, his reign shall be supremely prosperous. Such a king the 
Infinite Father approves, will have, and then will bless with un- 
limited and eternal prosperity. That stress is always laid upon 

the administration of justice to " the poor," i. e., the weak, defense- 
less on£s, suggests that government is made for this class ; it exists 
to protect those who have no other protector. It has practically 
no other mission save to stand for the protection and defense of 
those who are otherwise exposed to the selfish tyranny of mightier 
men. God has always accounted it his glory to interpose and 
withstand the oppressions of the strong upon the weak, and bring 
his almighty power into play as the perpetual antagonist force 
against the wrongs which sin in strong hands is sure to inflict 
where it can. This is the glory of King Messiah's reign. 

3. The mountains shall bring peace to the people, and 
the little hills, by righteousness. 

" The mountains shall bring," i. e., shall bring forth as their na- 
tural product — the figure being that the mountains and hills of 
Palestine, under high cultivation even to their summits and of 
most exuberant fertility, should bring forth harvests of peace, i. e., 
all prosperity to the people under this reign of righteousness. 

4. He shall judge the poor of the people, he shall save the 
children of the needy, and shall break in pieces the oppressor. 



PSALM LXXII. 



293 



Always delivering the helpless, friendless ones, he will have no 
mercy on oppressors, but crush them to atoms — to fine dust as the 
Hebrew naturally implies. Verily oppression finds no favor before 
the Great Father. He loves the weakest of his offspring and deems 
them his special charge. Woe to those, however mighty, who 
throw themselves athwart his out-gushing sympathies and would 
fain despoil those whom his heart loves and whom he makes it his 
glory to protect ! 

5. They shall fear thee as long as the sun and moon 
endure, throughout all generations. 

" They," men in general, the masses of the people throughout 
his wide realm, " shall fear thee," in reverence and submission, 
long as the sun shines ; literally with the sun — all along continu- 
ously with the shining of his sun upon the face of the earth ; also 
before the face of the moon, long as the moon shall wax and 

wane. So long shall Messiah reign. Inasmuch as the entire 

scope of this Psalm witnesses that this reign of King Messiah 
here portrayed is his kingdom on this earth in its present state 
and constitution, and is neither its future era in heaven itself nor 
any supposed era of peace upon some new earth, reconstructed 
both materially and spiritually, therefore we are most plainly 
taught here that Messiah's reign in the triumphs of truth and love 
upon this very world of ours and under its present constitution 
shall be indefinitely long, stretching on and on through untold, un- 
numbered ages. Beginning with the most positive, vigorous con- 
flict of light against darkness, love against hate ? peace against war, 
righteousness against all oppression, he shall wrest the scepter of 
rule from the grasp of Satan, god and prince of this world, and 
then himself rule on in the triumphs of truth and love over the 
very world which Satan had cursed so long. 

6. He shall come down like rain upon the mown grass : 
as showers that water the earth. 

7. In his days shall the righteous flourish ; and abund- 
ance of peace so long as the moon endureth. 

"The mown grass" is not the part cut off, but the part left 
standing with its roots in the soil. As rain upon the recently 
mowed meadows. Every farmer knows how the summer shower 
comes down with blessings and makes his grass spring up green 
and gladsome again. So King Messiah comes down to earth to 

bless his people and refresh the moral face of the world. " In 

his days shall the righteous flourish" the word coming naturally 
from the idea of the green, luxuriant meadows under the summer 
rain. P" Peace " in all its broad wealth of oriental meanings is the 
natural fruit of his coming down. Of this peace there shall be 
abundance — how long ? " Until there shall be no moon " — long as 
the moon shall shine ; long as this present world shall stand, with 
the sun its light by day and the moon its light by night. 



294 



PSALM LXXII. 



8. He shall have dominion also from sea to sea, and from 
the river unto the ends of the earth. 

Geographically, what are to be the boundaries of this kingdom ? 
As we ought to expect, the answer is given in terms drawn from 
ancient Hebrew geography, and specially from the national char- 
ter as given through Moses (Ex. 23: 31). "I will set thy bounds 
from the Red Sea even unto the sea of the Philistines (the Mediter- 
ranean), and from the desert [of Arabia] unto the river [ i. e., the 
great river Euphrates]. But while this original charter as given 
to Israel suggests most of the points it does not give them all. 
These boundaries compared with those have important variations, 
all in the line of indefinite enlargement. It is not from one specific 
sea [the Red] to another [the Mediterranean], but from any one 
sea to any and every other ; from the shore on one side to the utter- 
most shore on the other; and from the great river — this being the 
usual word for the Euphrates — to the end of the earth, in every 
direction ; i. e., absolute universality. The vast wide earth is his 
country ; the whole world his kingdom. He leaves out no province, 
no continent, no island, no sea, no ocean, no zone of all the earth 
from pole to pole. 

9. They that dwell in the wilderness shall bow before 
him ; and his enemies shall lick the dust. 

10. The kings of Tarshish and of the isles shall bring 
presents : the kings of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. 

11. Yea, all kings shall fall down before him : all nations 
shall serve him. 

" They that dwell in the wilderness " — not merely the Nomades 
in general, but the ivild men, untutored, uncivilized; the original 
word being applied to savage beasts (Isa. 13: 21, and 34: 14) as 

well as to savage men (Ps. 74: 14). "Shall bow" — stronger 

than the oriental " bow " of civility or even the obeisance due to 
royalty ; and implying complete subjection, as in the parallel 

phrase — "lick the dust." "Tarshish" — which some ancient 

geographers find in Western Italy ; more, in Southwestern Spain, 
and which seems in some cases to be applied to certain coast 
districts in North Africa — means here the remote regions reached 
by crossing the Mediterranean. " The isles " also include not 
merely the Islands of the great sea, but the coasts adjacent to it. 

"Sheba," (Arabia Felix) the richest portion of Arabia; and 

" Seba," thought to be equivalent to Meroe, representing the rich 
regions of Ethiopia. In general, these terms indicate the^ most 
wealthy regions known to the Hebrew commerce of the age of 

Solomon. They " bring presents" and "offer gifts" — words 

which suggest the two ideas — tribute as paid by subject nations, 
and religious offerings appropriate in the worship of God. They 
are the subjects of King Messiah and worship him as their infinite 



PSALM LXXIL 



295 



Lord. "All kings" — not only those here specified, but all the 

kings and nations of the whole earth. The world is his empire. 

12. For he shall deliver the needy when lie crieth ; the 
poor also, and him that hath no helper. 

13. He shall spare the poor and needy, and shall save 
the souls of the needy. 

14. He shall redeem their soul from deceit and violence : 
and precious shall their blood be in his sight. 

Beautifully the prophecy falls back once more to the moral 
reasons for conferring such unlimited power upon King Messiah — 
the same which are implied in vs. 2, 4 above. It is because he 
fills the divine and most perfect idea of a moral sovereign, admin- 
istering justice with faultless impartiality, and for evermore be- 
friending the oppressed as against his oppressor. Under his reign 
each needy one, crying for help, is heard and saved. Their blood 
is precious in his eyes. No harm done to them or attempted can 
escape his swift retribution. The strong, it is assumed, can take 
care of themselves ; the weak, defenseless ones are objects of his 
care; he rules for their protection and salvation. To right the 
wrongs of this long time sin-cursed earth is his special mission. 
Be his name praised forever for all this ! So the Psalmist proceeds 
to say. 

15. And he shall live, and to him shall be given of the 
gold of Sheba : prayer also shall be made for him continu- 
ally ; and daily shall he be praised. 

The grammatical forms in this verse strongly favor, if indeed 
they do not demand the construction whieh refers 14 he " [" he shall 
live "], not to the Messiah, but to his saved people, thought of as a 
body, a unit. The strong reasons for this construction are that 
the verbs are transitive rather than passive ; he (this saved people) 
shall give to him (the Messiah) the gold of Sheba, and shall pray 
to him continually, and shall daily praise him. The sense then 
will be that this redeemed people shall live in the sense of the 
highest and best prosperity, and shall pour out at his feet the very 
gold of Sheba, even as Sheba' s queen brought her munificent 
gifts to King Solomon (1 Kings 10: 1-10) ; and shall lift up their 
souls in prayer for the success of his kingdom ("thy kingdom 
come") continually, even people of every tribe and tongue in all 
lands of the earth ; and not their prayers alone but their praises 
shall be perpetual and universal 0 what an age will this be 
of prayer and praise, upborne from the saved ones of his vast 
kingdom ! 

16. There shall be a handful of corn in the earth upon 
the top of the mountains ; the fruit thereof shall shake like 
Lebanon : and they of the city shall flourish like grass of 
the earth. 



296 



PSALM LXXII. 



The Hebrew word for " handful " is not found elsewhere. Some 
of its supposed etymological affinities favor the sense— a small 
quantity; others, a large quantity, an abundance. The oldest Jew- 
ish authorities sustain the former sense. So also do the New Tes- 
tament parables, the "grain of mustard seed," and the "little 
leaven." The sense would then be that a handful of seed, sown in 
the most unfavorable localities, on the very top of the mountains, 
should wave its fruits like the cedars of Lebanon, indicating unex- 
ampled fertility. The populations of the city shall multiply on 

the same scale of productiveness, as the grass grows. 

17. His name shall endure forever: his name shall be 
continued as long as the sun : and men shall be blessed in 
him : all nations shall call him blessed. 

" His name shall be forever ; " held in honor and in power 
through all time. The second clause [his name shall be con- 
tinued" etc.] seems to imply that it shall have a self-perpetua- 
ting power, reproducing itself as human generations do, long as 

the sun shall shine. " Men shall be blessed in him " carries the 

thought back to the early promise made to Abraham [Gen. 12 : 3, 
and 22: 18] ; " Through him shall all the nations of the earth be 
blessed." They shall pronounce him most happy and most blest, 
rejoicing in his prosperity and sympathizing in the blessedness 
which he enjoys. 

18. Blessed he the Lord God, the God of Israel, who 
only doeth wondrous things. 

19. And blessed he his glorious name forever : and let 
the whole earth be filled with his glory. Amen, and Amen. 

To the Lord Jehovah, the covenant God of Israel, be all the 
glory of this kingdom, all the honor forgiving to Israel and to the 
wide world this munificent and perfect Sovereign ! He only and 
he alone performs such wondrous works. Let his glorious name 
be blessed forever, and the whole earth be vocal with his praises, 
full of his glory ! This rich doxology rounds out to its lit com- 
pletion this magnificent Psalm, and also fitly closes the second 
book of Psalms as originally compiled. 

20. The prayers of David the son of Jesse are ended. 

See remarks in the introduction to this Psalm. I suppose this 
verse to have been appended by the compilers on their supposition 
that they had now collected all the extant Psalms of David. 
Prayer, being their leading characteristic, naturally becomes their 
name : " the prayers of David." 



PSALM LXXriI. 



207 



PSALM LXXIII. 

This Psalm and also Psalms 74-83, following, are attributed to 
Asaph. But the question still remains — Was this the same Asaph 
who appears so prominently in the service of song in the age of 
David ? or was it some descendant of his, lineal or professional, 
bearing the same name ? The first Asaph was honorably associa- 
ted with David in the matter of song, including, it would seem, 
both the authorship of words and music, and the performance also 
(2 Chron. 29 : 30, and Neh. 12 : 46, and 1 Chron. 25 : 1, 2, 6). But 
in the age of Jehosaphat we find "a Levite of the sons of Asaph" 
(2 Chron. 20 : 14), and even in the times of Ezra " the children 
of Asaph" appear as singers (Ezra 2: 41). It is probable there- 
fore that the name Asaph reappeared from time to time among 

the descendants of that Asaph who labored with David. Some 

of these eleven Psalms must upon internal evidence be assigned 

to a time later than David. Psalm 73 might have been written 

at any point from David to Ezra. The writer had seen the wicked 
prosper apparently more than the righteous, and he was sorely 
troubled. He sets before us their ungodly pride ; their unaccount- 
able prosperity ; and his own perplexity and distress over this 
strange problem, until he went into God's sanctuary and there 
saw their fearful end portrayed. This relieves his mind of its dif- 
ficulty, and suggests the far different end of the righteous — amid 
the glories of which his song closes. 

The difficulty which troubled Asaph has troubled other minds 
in every age. The facts which he saw in the open world before 
him were by no means peculiar to that age ; they may be seen any 
where, in every age. It is, however, only the first or surface view 
of things which makes the trouble. Asaph at first tacitly assumed 
not only that retribution from God for the sins of men ought to be 
finished and made perfect in this present life, laying over nothing 
to be evened up in the world to come, but also that it ought to be 
kept good and perfect all along, step by step, day by day, so that an 
observer, dropping his eyes upon God's ways toward men at any 
point would see justice meted out promptly with no delay and 
with unvarying perfection. But this assumption is without foun- 
dation. Such retribution, immediate and perfect, is not God's 
way. His ways take time for their complete unfolding. Mani- 
festly he proposes to bear long with the wicked in order to make 
full proof of the power of forbearance and love upon human 
hearts to bring them to repentance. And if, as we see here, this 
system of forbearance and delay of retribution involves some 
moral trial to the righteous as well as to the wicked, God does 
not for that reason reject it, but finds use for it in a system wisely 
constructed for the largest discipline of moral probation. In this 

line lie the moral lessons of the Psalm before us. Speaking 

of this class of Psalms of which Ps. 73 and 37 are samples, m 



298 



PSALM LXXIII. 



Isaac Taylor remarks ("Spirit of Hebrew Poetry" p. 209): "The 
tone of these odes is meditative and ethical ; they represent those 
balancing thoughts by aid of which the pious in comparing their 
own lot, such as often it is, with the lot of the ungodly, or with 
the outside show of that lot, bring their mind to an even balance 
and restore its hopeful confidence in the divine favor." 

1. Truly God is good to Israel, even to such as are of 
a clean heart. 

Remarkably the Psalm opens, affirming as if by anticipation, 
the conclusion which he reaches at the end. It is as if he would 
say: Though, as I am about to show you, my mind has labored 
long and most painfully over this perplexing problem, yet I have 
come at last most fully to this conclusion : God is surely good to 
his true Israel. Note, they are not all Israel who are of Israel 
(Rom. 9: 6). He would have us remember that by "Israel" he 
means only the pure in heart — " the Israelites indeed in whom is 
no guile." 

2. But as for me, my feet were almost gone ; my steps 
had well nigh slipped. 

3. For I was envious at the foolish, wlien I saw the pros- 
perity of the wicked. 

" As for me," introduces his own personal experience. I wish 
to tell you that personally I have had most perplexing trials over 
this matter. I have been stumbled, and within a little of abso- 
lutely falling. The original suggests feet "stretched out," 

"poured out," sprawling, as if to make such a fall a serious, not 

to say almost ludicrous, thing. For I was envious of the proud, 

those who make a great show or literally a shine in the world, 
when (I said) I will look into this matter, the prosperity of wicked 
men. He thought to make this a special study, and he was per- 
plexed. 

4. For there are no bands in their death: but their 
strength is firm. 

"No bands; " more precisely, no pangs; their death is not pain- 
ful. Their bodies are fat, plump, even to their death — not emacia- 
ted, worn with long sickness. The word for " strength " means 
properly the body, the person. This is the first point in his de- 
scription — a death comparatively painless. 

. 5. They are not in trouble as other men ; neither are they 
plagued like other men. 

They are not involved in the troubles common to men ; they are 
not smitten, afflicted, equally with other men of our frail race. 

6. Therefore pride compasseth them about as a chain; 
violence covereth them as a garment. 



PSALM LXXIII. 



299 



"As a chain," not in the sense of a fetter, but rather of a neck- 
lace, a personal ornament. The original verb leaves us to choose 
between stretching out the neck, carrying the head with a lofty- 
bearing, and wearing pride as a necklace. The parallel clause fa- 
vors the latter. They are not only oppressive, but are proud of 
it, glorying in their guilty shame. 

7. Their eyes stand out with fatness : they have more 
than heart could wish. 

The first clause is well put, the original suggesting that their eye 
goes forth out of fatness. In the last clause the marginal ver- 
sion, "They pass the thoughts of the heart," comes nearer to the 
true sense. The imaginations of their heart in the sense of their 
wicked devices, overflow, pour out, from their very abundance. 
The original words seem to demand this construction. 

8. They are corrupt, and speak wickedly concerning op- 
pression : they speak loftily. 

9. They set their mouth against the heavens, and their 
tougue walketh through the earth. 

Instead of " corrupt," I prefer to translate : " They mock " 
[speak insultingly], "and speak in wickedness; they speak op- 
pressively as from on high," i. e., as from a commanding position, 
as men of authority whose words are with power. V. 9 liter- 
ally reads: "They set their mouth in the heavens; their tongue 
ranges [at will] in the earth," i. e., their proud utterances breathe 
defiance to God above and to men below ; they fear nothing in the 
heavens or in the earth. 

10. Therefore his people return hither : and waters of a 
full cup are wrung out to them. 

11. And they say, How doth God know ? and is there 
knowledge in the Most High ? 

Questions of some difficulty arise here, e. g., Where do his peo- 
ple go, and in what sense "return?" Who are they (v. 11) who 
say, " How doth God know?" and what is the spirit of this ques- 
tion? Moreover the original gives two readings for the verb 

"return," the second having the sense of causing to return, in 
which case the subject of the verb is God — God causes his people 
to return. But this distinction has only minor importance, for if 
the agency of God is not expressed in the verb, it is at least im- 
plied. 1 paraphrase the passage thus: Therefore [under the 

presence and pressure of these facts concerning the wicked] God's 
people are brought into this perplexed and questioning attitude of 
mind, ["hither"], into the state already described ; and they drink 
a cup of bitter waters to the dregs. They even say, How can it 
be that God knows all this and yet lets these rebels against his 
throne live and prosper thus? It does not seem possible that God 
would permit such things if he really knew them ! Another con- 



300 



PSALM LXXIII. 



struction of v. 10 is given by some with the sense : Therefore his 
people apostatize, go over to the party of those wicked men ; and 
find only the bitterest sorrow there. But the first construction 
above given is the more natural, and yields a sense far more in 
line with the drift of the Psalm as well as more in accordance 
with facts. 

12. Behold, these are the ungodly, who prosper in the 
world ; they increase in riches. 

The same speakers continue : Look at this, say they ; these are 
godless men, open enemies of the Most High, yet they prosper for- 
ever, i. e., all their way through life, and are constantly heaping 
up riches. The middle clause can scarcely mean, The peaceful 
men of this world are they; but rather, the peaceful ones of all 
time, of perpetuity, this being the almost invariable sense of the 

well known Hebrew word Olo.m* 
* 

13. Verily I have cleansed my heart in vain, and washed 
my hands in innocency. 

14. For all the day long have I been plagued, and chas- 
tened every morning. 

While impiety pays so well, yielding such returns, it is of the 
least possible account to be pious. That I have made my heart 
pure and washed my hands morally clean is only in vain, i e., al- 
together in vain, bringing me no adequate reward. For I have 
been vexed and scourged all the day long and chastened every 

morning. I see no such hard lot befalling the wicked. This is 

the climax. His heart-troubles and perplexities have reached 
their maximum. It is terrible. 

15. If I say, I will speak thus; behold, I should offend 
against the generation of thy children. 

If I said [to myself] I will speak thus (i. e., as above, vs. 11-14), 
lo, I should deal treacherously against thy children. It would be 
a breach of good faith — would viokte my sacred obligations. 
Literally, the original seems to say — If at any time — whenever I 
thought in myself, I will speak so, I did break good faith with thy 
children. It was playing false to my obligations toward them; 

laying a stumbling-block before them for their destruction. 

Some expositors (less Avell) give it thus : I should apostatize from 
their communion. 

16. When I thought to know this, it was too painful for 
me : 

17. Until I went into the sanctuary of God ; then under- 
stood I their end. 

If yet I searched [dug deep] to know this, it was painful toil to 



PSALM LXXIJI. 



301 



my eyes — until I went into the sanctuary of God and there con- 
sidered, profoundly studied, their latter end. The Italic word 

" then " in our English version were better omitted. He was sorely 
troubled until he went into God's sanctuary and until he studied 
their latter end there, before God, and in the light of the revela- 
tions of God made there. It is implied (not expressed) that he 

then found relief. If the question be asked, By what means 

did the Psalmist obtain at the sanctuary such light respecting the 
final doom of the wicked ? the answer is : From the public read- 
ing of the written word of God there and from the rehearsal of 
inspired songs in the worship of the sanctuary. The Pentateuch, 
certainly in their hands then, was full of demonstrations of tho 
sudden and fearful end of the wicked — of which it may suffice to 
name the deluge, Sodom, Egypt, and the rebellious factions of 
Israel in the desert. The same truths are brought out in many 
Psalms. 

18. Surely thou didst set them in slippery places : thou 
castedst them down into destruction. 

19. How are they brought into desolation, as in a moment ! 
they are utterly consumed with terrors. 

The word for " surely " has usually the somewhat stronger sense 
of only. Only in slippery places, never on any solid foundation, 
thou hast set and evermore wilt set them. Thou hast hurled them 
down into destruction. Ah, how suddenly, as in the twinkling of 
an eye, are they in desolation ! They are brought to an end ; they 
are finished — used up, by means of terrors — as if by the very power 
of consternation ! How suddenly are they made to feel that they 
can not stand before the dreadful God ! 

20. As a dream when one awaketh ; so, 0 Lord, when 
thou awakest, thou shalt despise their image. 

The last word of the verse, "image," seems to mean, the 
imagination of their dream — the mind's fancies in sleep. The 
thought then is — as one makes small account of his dreams when 
once fully waked, so, 0 Lord, when thou hast waked them from 

their sleep wilt thou despise their dreaming. Not " when thou 

thyself awakest," as if God himself had been asleep, but, as the 
verb in this grammatical form must mean, when thou hast caused 
them to awake, thou wilt make not the least account of their vain 
imaginations in mere dreams. 

21. Thus my heart was grieved, and I was pricked in my 
reins. 

22. So foolish was I, and ignorant: I was as a beast 
before thee. 

" Was grieved " — literally, was in fermentation like yeast. 
"Was pricked" — stung with excruciating thought. He is now 



302 



PSALM LXXIII. 



profoundly ashamed of himself, and can compare himself only 
with the irrational brutes. It seems to him passing strange that 

he should have thought and felt so. The verbs in v. 21 are 

future in form — a fact to be accounted for probably by that pecu- 
liarity of the Hebrew mind under which they were wont to throw 
themselves back into the past and give their views of what was 
then present and future by using the future tense. 

23. Nevertheless I am continually with thee : thou hast 
liolden me by my right hand. 

24. Thou shalt guide me with thy counsel, and afterward 
receive me to glory. 

But strange to say — strange considering how I have thought and 
felt as to thee — I am constantly with thee ; thou hast held me fast 
by my right hand, against that fatal fall of which I spake as almost 
befalling me (v. 2). " In thy counsel thou wilt lead me and after- 
ward receive me gloriously," or, perhaps, into glory — the former 
however being the more precise shade of the original. Thou wilt 
gloriously take me to thyself. TVhat more could "he ask? 

25. "Whom have I in heaven but thee? and there is none 
upon earth that I desire besides thee. 

Literally — "What is there for me in the heavens? and compared 
with thee I have no pleasure upon the earth. Our English version 
expresses well the ultimate sense of these brief but most precious 
words. Heaven may be beautiful, but there is no beauty there like 
that of God ; nay more, comparatively speaking, no beauty there 
save what is in God. Heaven may be social, full of created beings 
of lofty powers and most genial nature; but what are they all 
compared with God ! This is the spontaneous utterance of all true 
love to God. The glories of his character throw every thing else 
into the shade. The blessedness of his favor and friendship sur- 
passses all other joy immeasurably. Nothing else should be once 
named or thought of in the comparison. 

" Were I in heaven without my God, 
'T would be no joy to me." 

So also, earth with its utmost attractions affords nothing to be 
loved and enjoyed compared with God. 

26. My flesh and my heart faileth : but God is the 
strength of my heart and my portion forever. 

"My flesh and my heart" — body and soul — languish, lose their 
vital force, sink under the pressure of weakness and the strain of 
toil ; but God is the rock of my heart and my everlasting portion. 
O how true to the experience of the child of God ! And how full 
of blessedness is this truth ! All enduring life, all abiding joy, are 
in God alone 



PSALM LXXIV. 



303 



27. For, lo, they that are far from thee shall perish : 
thou hast destroyed all them that go a whoring from thee. 

To be far from God is ruin; for is not he the fountain of all 
life — as truly of the life of the soul, of its peace and joy, as of 
the life of the body, sustaining its vital forces and ministering to 

its joyous vigor. To go away from God is naturally and always 

to play the harlot, for is not God a Father, nay, a Husband, hold- 
ing all his redeemed children in relations to himself most endear- 
ing and sacred, even like those between husband and wife ? No 
mistake can be greater than to think of divorcing one's self from 
God as being no crime. It is of all crimes the greatest ! 

28. But it is good for me to draw near to God : I have 
put my trust in the Lord God, that I may declare all thy 
works. 

But being near to God is good to me; I know it in my own 
precious experience. It is not only a good but all good. Compre- 
hensively it sums up all; leaves out nothing. 1 have put my 

trust in the Lord Jehovah, the God of my covenant, and with the 
purpose in my heart of publishing all his works. I will speak for 
God and not be silent. Rebuking myself for my former folly, re- 
turning to a better mind and to far other views of the Great God, I 
discard those vexing thoughts. I am ashamed that I ever indulged 
them, and much more that I ever uttered them. Henceforth it 
remains to witness for God that his ways are perfect ; his glory 
infinite; his love the joy of heaven and the joy of earth, beyond 

which I have nothing else or more to seek. Thus endeth this 

wonderful song. 

PSALM LXXIV. 

This Psalm, designed for public instruction ["Maschil"] is 
ascribed to Asaph, but doubtless in the same general sense as Ps. 
73; i. e., one of the family or school of Asaph, in charge of sacred 
song, and from time to time preparing new Psalms for public 
use. — —As to its historic relations critics are divided in opinion 
between the despoiling of the temple by King Ahaz, and the de- 
struction of both city and temple by the Chaldeans. The former 
was a grave matter and must have been exceedingly afflictive to 
all pious Jews. (See 2 Kings 16 : 14-18, and 2 Chron. 28: 21-25). 
A very large proportion of the Psalms in this Book III (Ps. 
73-89) are located historically between the revolt and the death of 
Hezekiah. This fact has had great influence to induce certain 
critics to assign this to the times of Ahaz. But fatal objections 
to this view appear in numerous points which refuse to be applied 
to the facts of that age, e. g., perpetual (or perhaps utter) desola- 
tions (v. 3) ; the ensigns of the enemy set up for signs (v. 4) ; the 



304 



PSALM LXXIV. 



burning of the sanctuary (vs. 7, 8); "no more any prophet" (v. 9), 
etc. These and other points of the description seem to demand 
the reference of this Psalm to the scenes and the time of the de- 
struction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans. Though brief, it com- 
pares readily with the lamentations of Jeremiah both in its tone 
and in the facts to which it alludes. 

1. O God, why hast thou cast us off forever? why doth 
thine anger smoke against the sheep of thy pasture ? 

" Cast off," i. e., with loathing, repellency as the verb implies. 
Why doth thine anger burn and therefore smoke against the flock of 
thine own feeding, the people whom thou hast nursed and fed and 
blessed through so many generations ? This point in the description 
puts the case strongly. Will our own God discard us after so 
many and so long continued demonstrations of his love and care ? 

2. Remember thy congregation which thou hast purchased 
of old ; the rod of thine inheritance, which thou hast re- 
deemed ; this mount Zion, wherein thou hast dwelt. 

"Thy congregation" means a people with whom thou hast often 
met in holy assembly upon invitation at stated times, and there- 
fore a people that should be dear to thee. " Hast purchased," 

redeemed them out of Egypt, as if by paying a ransom for their 

national life. " The rod of thine inheritance " — rod in the sense 

of stock, a tribe or family of many generations. As a tree and 
all its branches are a unit, so a patriarch and all his descendants 
are one body, this being the figure of " the rod of his inheritance." 
The fact that God had for long ages dwelt in Mount Zion and 
practically acknowledged Israel as his own people, is made one 
ground of this imploring plea, and the Psalmist beseeches God to 
remember it. 

3. Lift up thy feet unto the perpetual desolations ; even 
all that the enemy hath done wickedly in the sanctuary. 

Come down and walk over these fearful, utter desolations, and 
see all the destruction which the enemy hath wrought in the 
sanctuary. Who can behold these desolations without pity for 
the sufferers and indignation against the authors thereof? 

4. Thine enemies roar in the midst of thy congregations ; 
they set up their ensigns for signs. 

"Roar" as savage wild beasts exulting over tLeir prey. 

" Ensigns for signs," but the Hebrew word in each case is the 
same. They set up their military and idolatrous banners in place 
of our banner of the Lord. 

5. A man was famous according as he had lifted up axes 
upon the thick trees. 

6. But now they break down the carved work thereof at 
once with axes and hammers. 



PSALM LXXIV. 



305 



These Chaldean warriors (vandal savages!) sought notoriety 
and glory in breaking down with axe and hammer all the beau- 
tiful carved work of the sanctuary, even as the wood-chopper 
makes himself known and noted by his dexterity and power in 
felling the thick trees of the forest. This seems to be the point 
of this comparison. Ah ! how sad to the heart of those who had 
loved and admired the adornments and surroundings of the holy 
temple ! 

7. They have cast fire into thy sanctuary, they have de- 
filed by casting down the dwelling-place of thy name to the 
ground. 

8. They said in their hearts, Let us destroy them to- 
gether : they have burned up all the synagogues of God in 
the land. 

Literally, they have cast thy sanctuary into the tire ; to the earth 
have they profaned the dwelling-place of thy name — as if they 
would hurl it into the fire and stamp it beneath their proud feet ! 
Their thought was — Let us bury them in one common ruin, the 

people and their sanctuary together. " Synagogues of God." 

The original does not admit the more modern, i. e., the New Tes- 
tament sense of synagogue, viz., the local houses of worship scat- 
tered over all the land. This word * is used very frequently in the 
Old Testament in the sense of appointed times for stated worship ; 
the place for such worship, and the assembly itself ; here doubtless 
for the temple as specially the place, the one only place (the plural 
of excellence) for all ritual worship of God in the land. This 
was the head and front of the Chaldean outrages. They had 
burned up the only place for the worship of the true God in all the 
land, or as the word naturally means, the earth. 

9. We see not our signs : there is no more any prophet : 
neither is there among us any that knoweth how long. 

We no longer see our sacred insignia, the ark, the mercy-seat, 
the Cherubim, the Urim and Thummim, the altar and its appen- 
dages ; and what aggravates our distress greatly, we have no more 
any prophet of God who can tell us how long this desolation shall 
continue. This Psalm was manifestly written while the scenes it 
portrays were yet fresh, the ruins still smoking (we might almost 
say), and before Jeremiah had foretold "how long." 

10. O God, how long shall the adversary reproach ? shall 
the enemy blaspheme thy name forever ? 

11. Why withdrawest thou thy hand, even thy right 
hand? pluck it out of thy bosom. 

"How long?" was the point of most vital interest. Could it be 



306 



PSALM LXXIV. 



that God would let this desolation go on forever? Withdrawing 

the right hand from their aid implies standing aloof from their 

help. The last clause, translated, " Pluck it out of thy bosom," 

is in Hebrew highly elliptical, thus: "From thy bosom consume" 
i. e., finish, make an utter end of them. It is implied, (not ex- 
pressed) that the hand is drawn out of the bosom ; the thing ex- 
pressed is, consume them. 

12. For God is my King of old, working salvation in 
the midst of the earth. 

Here the tone of the Psalm changes, the mind reverting to the 
glorious past and to the wondrous displays of God's power and 
faithfulness in behalf of his people. The Psalmist speaks for the 
whole people. " God is my King ; " and all the people unite to 
say, "Often achieving salvation for me in the midst of the 
earth." 

13. Thou didst divide the sea by thy strength: thou 
breakest the heads of the dragons in the waters. 

14. Thou breakest the heads of leviathan in pieces, and 
gavest him to be meat to the people inhabiting the wilder- 
ness. 

15. Thou didst cleave the fountain and the flood: thou 
driedst up mighty rivers. 

Appropriately the song reverts to the glorious works of God at 
the Red Sea, through the Arabian desert, and at the passage of the 
Jordan. " By thy power thou didst cleave the sea asunder; thou 
didst shiver to atoms the heads of the great sea-monsters — said 
apparently to celebrate God's absolute dominion over the sea and 
its mighty populations." "Leviathan ;" literally, a crooked ser- 
pent, but used like "dragon" for the largest class of sea animals. 
The poet represents the mighty hand of God at the Red Sea as 
shattering all the huge sea-monsters, and tossing them up upon 
the farther shore to become meat for the people dwelling there ; 
but really it would seem with his eye on that proud host — Egypt's 
horsemen and charioteers, sunk in its mighty waves and their dead 

carcasses washed upon the desert shore. "Thou didst cleave 

fountain and flood," with probable allusion to the cleaving of the 
rocks under the rod of Moses, out of which waters ran as a river. 

" Thou driedst up mighty rivers," looks to the passage of the 

Jordan. The word for "mighty" denotes rather a living, peren- 
nial stream, never naturally dry. Such was the Jordan, and 
moreover at the time of this miracle, at high flood, overflowing all 

its banks. These wonderful achievements of their Almighty 

King were good to think of in such seasons of sorrow and despon- 
dency as that of the writer of this Psalm and of his people. 



PSALM LXXIV. 



307 



16. The day is thine, the night also is thine : thou hast 
prepared the light and the sun. 

17. Thou hast set all the borders of the earth : thou hast 
made summer and winter. 

Achievements more grand than those at the Red Sea and the 
Jordan come here before the mind. The God of Israel is none 
other than the Infinite Creator, the Author of day and night, of 
light and darkness, who ordained the bounds of land and sea, and 
the changes of the seasons — summer and winter. This seems to 
imply that he who made the sun for the joyous light of earth by 
day could bring up the sunlight of prosperity upon his people and 
dispel the darkness of their captivity. He who makes summer and 
winter could change the frost of their winter to the sunshine and 
order of summer again. 

18. Eemember this, that the enemy hath reproached, O 
Lord, and that the foolish people have blasphemed thy 
name. 

This one thing let not Jehovah, their covenant God, forget— that 
the enemy had reproached his name, and were still bringing re- 
proach upon it. Could he bear this ? Would it be for his honor 
before the nations of the earth that his people should be utterly 
broken down as if their own God were powerless to save ? 

19. O deliver not the soul of thy turtle-dove unto the 
multitude of the wicked : forget not the congregation of thy 
poor forever. 

The general sense of this verse is obvious, yet the original is 
difficult, especially on account of the apparent play upon the one 
word translated in the first clause, " multitude " and in the second 
" congregation " — applied therefore in the former case to the 
enemies of God; in the latter, to his friends. The word "soul" 
probably qualifies this word * which primarily means an animal 
or a herd of beasts — the sense being : Surrender not thy turtle- 
dove (gentle, timid, defenseless) to this greedy blood-thirsty herd ; 
forget not the herd — the mass of thy poor ones, forever. 

20. Have respect unto the covenant : for the dark places 
of the earth are full of the habitations of cruelty. 

" Look to the covenant ; " fix thine eye, thy thought, upon thy 
covenant of mercy with thy people ; for the darknesses of the earth 
are full of the dwelling places of cruelty— as if cruelty found its 

native home there. The darknesses, or dark places of the earth, 

are here the Babylon to which God's people were borne away to 
captivity. No true light of God was there ; nought but intensified 
darkness. Consequently cruelty dwelt there, a people fierce and 



rm * 



308 



PSALM LXXV. 



savage (See Sab. 1 : 6, 7) who could taunt their Jewish captives 
with the challenge to sing their songs of Zion (Ps. 137). 

21. O let not the oppressed return ashamed : let the poor 
and needy praise thy name. 

"Return" — turn back as one baffled, frustrated. w Ashamed," 
in the usual sense, put to shame. Rather, let the poor, i. e., thy 
poor, helpless people have cause to praise thy name for thy 
delivering mercy. 

22. Arise, O God, plead thine own cause : remember how 
the foolish man reproacheth thee daily. 

23. Forget not the voice of thine enemies : the tumult 
of those that rise up against thee increaseth continually. 

The final plea turns upon the honor of God and his regard for 
his own name before the nations. Forget not the voice of thine 
enemies — their exultation over thy conquered people, their shouts 
of triumph [" tumult "] which ascend continually — this being the 
sense rather than " increaseth." These impious shouts of the 
exultant Chaldeans rise up continually before God. He can not 
ignore them ; he is entreated to take note thereof and avenge him- 
self upon such enemies. In such emergencies it is never amiss to 
plead — " What wilt thou do, 0 our God, for thy great name ? " 
(Jer. 14: 7-9, 21, 22). 

O0>«0«> 

PSALM LXXV. 

The caption commits this Psalm " to the chief Musician " for use 
in the sanctuary service; adds the words " Al Taschith " (destroy- 
not) which appear elsewhere only in Ps. 57-59 (See Notes on the 

caption to Ps. 57), and ascribes the Psalm to Asaph. On the 

question of date and historic occasion the Psalm has in itself no 
very distinctive indications. But the historic allusions in Ps. 76 
locate that Psalm almost unmistakably in the times of Hezekiah 
and the famed overthrow of the Assyrian host; and this Psalm (75) 
is obviously one of a pair with that. The very first verses indicate 
this. " His name is great in Israel," says Ps. 76 ; u For thy name 
is near; thy wondrous works declare it," says Ps. 75. Thanks 
for some signal manifestation of power and love in behalf of Israel 
is the tone of Ps. 76, v. 11 calling for the payment of the vows and 
the bringing of presents to One who had shown himself terrible to 
their foes; while Ps. 75 strikes the same key-note in its first 
words: " Unto thee, O Lord, do we give thanks." The judgments 
of God on some proudly wicked power are the special occasion for 
both Psalms. I assume it, therefore, as highly probable that these 
Psalms contemplate the same historic event, viz., that most wonder- 
ful interposition of God for his people which distinguished the 



PSALM LXXV. 



309 



reign of Hezekiah and of which Isaiah was botli the prophet and 
the°historian. (See his prophecies of it Isa. 10 : 5-34, and 14 : 24- 
27, and 17 : 12-14, and 33; also his history, chapters 36 and 37.) 

1. Unto thee, O God, do we give thanks, unto thee do 
we give thanks: for that thy name is near thy wondrous 
works declare. 

The clause, "Thy name is near," is a fine illustration of the 
Hebrew usage of the word "name " to represent the special mani- 
festations of God to men in the line of his power, wisdom, and 
love, here expressively grouped under the phrase, " Thy wonder- 
ful works." The last part of the verse, more closely translated, 

might stand: "Thy name is near; thy wondrous works declare 
it;" or possibly thus: They [men in general] declare thy won- 
drous works. God is so near, manifests himself so openly and so 
signally that his glorious works are on every tongue ; or those 
works themselves are both lip and tongue to declare it. Nothing 
less than this could fitly represent the prevalent feeling of the sons 
and daughters of Jerusalem when they arose one morning to find 
one hundred and eighty-five thousand dead corpses where but the 
night before lay the proud host of Assyria's king — the spoil strown 
over the country along their retreating path and the survivors of 
that host gone, never to return ! Did they not feel deep in their 
heart that not their own hand but God's hand had done this? 
Ah indeed, his name on that eventful night was near; his won- 
drous works told it too plainly to be misunderstood. 

2. When I shall receive the congregation I will judge up- 
rightly. 

3. The earth and all the inhabitants thereof are dis- 
solved : I bear up the pillars of it. Selah. 

The " I " of these verses is not, as the reader might at first view 
suppose, the writer of the Psalm, nor king Hezekiah, nor indeed 
any other merely human king. The last clause, <( I bear up the 
pillars of the earth," is altogether too much to come from any 
mortal lip. The better view therefore is to assume that God him- 
self is the speaker here. In v. 1 his wondrous works are thought 
of as speaking, telling their message [the precise sense of the He- 
brew word "declare"]. It is by no violent transition therefore 
that in these verses God himself speaks. The English transla- 
tion fails to give the exact thought. It is better thus : " For I will 
take a set time; I will judge righteously. The land and all the 
dwellers in it are panic-smitten; I have adjusted the pillars there- 
of." That is, I will assign a time for manifesting my royal pre- 
rogative of judging the nations ; then I will judge them in right- 
eousness. It is an hour of consternation over all my land; men's 
hearts meditate terror (Isa. 33 : 18) and can think and feel nothing 
else. It is as if the very earth were melting away beneath their 
feet, but I have the responsibility for its pillars; I shall hold them 

14 



310 



PSALM LXXV. 



to their place, and this great terror will pass away as if it had 
been but a dream. "Selah;" pause and dwell on a promise so 
precious, a relief so divine ! 

4. I said unto the fools, Deal not foolishly : and to the 
wicked, Lift not up the horn : 

5. Lift not up your horn on high : speak not with a stiff 
neck. 

It seems better here also to attribute the words directly to God 
as the speaker. If however the Psalmist speaks, he speaks for 

God and in his behalf. The sentiments are his. The "horn" 

is the organ and symbol of power and also of pride. Horned 
animals when high-spirited and half furious throw high the horn, 
to which the proud king of Assyria is not unaptly compared. His 
spirit is fully brought out in the words of Isaiah (10: 7-14, and 
36: 4-10, 13-20). These verses are God's admonition to him and 
to all like him to beware how they insult the God of heaven ! 
" Pride goeth before destruction; a haughty spirit before a fall." 

6. For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from 
the west, nor from the south. 

7. But God is the judge : he putteth down one, and set- 
teth up another. 

The word "promotion" * assumes the original word to be an in- 
finitive verb, meaning to lift high, instead of being the plural, 
mountains, as usual. But it is harsh to use such an infinitive as a 
noun ; its location at the very end of the verse is adverse to this 
construction ; besides that it stands in the closest relation with the 
word wilderness ["south"] immediately before it. I therefore 
prefer to translate the verse thus, in the most direct, immediate 
connection with what precedes : " For not from the east, nor from 
the west, and not from the wilderness of the mountains" [the great 
Arabian wilderness on the south] "for God himself is judge; he 
prostrates this and lifts high that." The course of thought is, 
Throw not your horn proudly in the air as if your power were su- 
preme, and the destinies of all earth's nations were in your hand; 
for the decision of destinies comes neither from the east nor west, 
nor from the glorious old mountains of the region of Sinai, but 
God only and alone is judge — the sole and Almighty Arbiter of 
human destiny. He hurls down this nation and lifts high that one 
at his supreme pleasure. With only the word of his power he 
speaks and -it is done ! 

8. For in the hand of the Loed there is a cup, and the 
wine is red ; it is full of mixture ; and he poureth out of 
the same : but the dregs thereof, all the wicked of the 
earth shall wring them out, and drink them. 



onn* 



PSALM LXXVI. 



311 



The way he dealt that day before all Israel with the boastful, 
blasphemous Assyrian suggests the thought of this verse ; a, cup 
of spiced, hot, intoxicating wine, maddening and deadly, which the 
wicked nation must drink from his hand to its very dregs. They 
put themselves in battle array against almighty God ; of course 
they fell. Their madness became their death. How could it be 
otherwise ? 

9. But I will declare forever; I will sing praises to the 
God of Jacob. 

10. All the horns of the wicked also will I cut off; but 
the horns of the righteous shall be exalted. 

But I for my part — I in the broadest antithesis with their 
spirit — will set forth the glorious deeds of Jehovah forever; I will 
sing praises to the God of Jacob. In v. 10 it is simply a ques- 
tion of taste whether we shall suppose the speaker (I) to be God 
himself, or the author of the Psalm, drawn by the strong sympathy 
of his soul to speak in God's behalf. The truth spoken is the same 
as in vs. 4-8. The horns of the wicked and proud Assyrian are 
cut off, and God will do the same thing with every like proud and 
wicked nation (or individual); but the horn of righteous Israel 
and of every other righteous nation shall be exalted. 



PSALM LXXVI. 

The caption consigns this Psalm to the " Chief Musician," to be 
sung with an instrument called "Neginoth," the author being of 
the school of Asaph. — —The points made in the Psalm adapt them- 
selves so nicely, not to say perfectly, to the destruction of the As- 
syrian host during the reign of Hezekiah, that we need look no 
further for its date and historic reference. (See notes introductory 
to Ps. 75.) 

1. In Judah is God known : his name is great in Israel. 
Well might it be said then, "In Judah is God known;," known 

as the hearer of prayer ; known as the enduring, unfailing Friend 
of his covenant people; known as One mighty to save. "His 
name is great in Israel;" how could it be otherwise after such 
displays of matchless power and terrible retribution upon the 
proud Assyrian! 

2. In Salem also is his tabernacle, and his dwelling-place 
in Zion. 

Salem is but another name for Jersusalem — the city of the 
Great King, the place of God's special abode, where first his tent 
and afterward his temple was located. Assyria's king had 
proudly hurled defiance at the God of Israel ; in the words of 



312 



PSALM LXXVI. 



Isaiah (10: 33), had "shaken his hand at the mount of the daugh- 
ter of Zion, the hill of Jerusalem; " but the God who dwelt there 
sent forth his angel through that Assyrian camp one awful 
night — it was enough ! The dwelling-place of Israel's God was 
safe ! 

3. There brake he the arrows of the bow, the shield, and 
the sword, and the battle. Selah. 

There, at that point, just as that marshaled host thought them- 
selves within striking distance and ready to smite the city — there 
Jehovah shivered the lightnings of the bow, the shield, the 

sword — all his implements of battle. Pause and think of that 

crash underneath the stroke of the Almighty ! 

4. Thou art more glorious and excellent than the moun- 
tains of prey. 

Before the poet proceeds to speak more fully of the effects of 
that one dreadful blow, he must needs celebrate the superlative 
glory of Him who dealt it upon his foes. "Thou art brilliant" — 
shining and "magnificent," far above the sublime mountain peaks 
so often chosen by robber-mountaineers. So I understand this 
somewhat difficult passage. Some suppose that mountains are put 
here for mighty kingdoms, with reference to those hostile, conquer- 
ing powers at that time in arms against Judah ; but this seems to 
me less poetical and therefore less apt and pertinent than the con- 
struction above given. 

5. The stout-hearted are spoiled, they have slept their 
sleep: and none of the men of might have found their 
hands. 

Resuming the description of that immense slaughter, he gives 
three distinct points: (a) Those stout-hearted ones — men of 
mighty heart, fearless and brave— are spoiled, (b) They have 
gone to their last sleep, from which men never wake, (c) Men 
of might they were, but their hands are for evermore powerless. 
They no longer find aught for their hands to do. In the prosaic 
history of Isaiah: "In the morning they were all dead corpses." 

6. At thy rebuke, O God of Jacob, both the chariot and 
horse are cast into a dead sleep. 

Not men only but chariots and horses are cast by thy rebuke 
into a dead sleep. The chariots are silent as death, or perhaps 
the reference may be to the death of the chariot-horses. The 
dread mission of Death was not to the warriors alone but to 
the horses as well, of which they had been specially proud (Isaiah 
36: 8). 

7. Thou, even thou, art to be feared: and who may stand 
in thy sight when once thou art angry ? 



PSALM LXXVI. 



313 



"Thou" is made by repetition specially emphatic. Thou and 
none other or else ; thou alone art to be feared. Who can stand 
before thee after thine anger begins to burn ? 

8. Thou didst cause judgment to be heard from heaven ; 
the earth feared, and was still, 

9. When God arose to judgment, to save all the meek 
of the earth. Selah. 

From out of his high heavens God made the mandate for his 
judgments to be heard — judgments in the sense of visitations of 
destruction upon his defiant foes. Earth feared and hushed itself 

to silence before God's awful voice. -It was to save the meek 

ones — meek in the two-fold sense of pious and frail — the poor, de- 
pendent ones who cast themselves on their God for help. Pause 

and contemplate this wonderful interposition ! 

10. Surely the wrath of man shall praise thee : the re- 
mainder of wrath shalt thou restrain. 

Instead of "surely" the Hebrew gives us /or* indicating that 
the judgment on Assyria was only in accord with the universal 

principle of God's government here brought to view. The first 

clause of this verse is very plain ; the second, somewhat difficult — 
at least it is variously interpreted. The Hebrew verb "restrain" 
will scarcely admit any other sense than gird on as the warrior 
does his sword. Hence the English version can not well be justi- 
fied from the Hebrew. We have therefore to choose between 

these several interpretations. (1) The last and utmost remains 

of human wrath thou wilt gird about thee as it were thine own 
sword for the destruction of thy foes : (2) The remainder of thine 
own wrath — its extremest manifestations — thou wilt gird on for 
judgment, etc. : (3) The remains of thy wrath in the sense of 
those who survive the visitations of thy wrath, thou wilt attach to 

thyself, converting them from foes to friends.- The last named 

seems to get more from the words than they can naturally mean. 
The second in order makes the same word in the second clause 
refer to the wrath of God which in the first refers to the wrath of 
man. This is harsh, unnatural, and therefore, being uncalled for, 
should be rejected. The first-named has decidedly the preference. 
In this construction the second clause carries out the idea of the 
first. God can use the wrath of man to any extent for his own 
praise. No matter how fierce, no matter how extreme or desperate, 
the more the better for his purposes ; he can so easily gird it on 
and make it the very sword of his righteous retribution upon his 

proud and maddened foes. Comparing this construction with 

that of the received English version, it will be seen that this is 
much the stronger and gives a bolder view of God's over-ruling 



314 



PSALM LXXVI. 



agencies. While the English version represents him as curbing 
in man's wickedness as if he could not make it work out his 
praise (or at least whenever he can not), our construction assumes 
his infinite power to make any and all of it evolve his praise, 
since he can even use it as his chief instrument in subduing his 
foes. Their utmost outbursts of wrath are his sword which he girds 

on for the battle against sin and wrath. Sennacherib was a case 

in point. He was full of pride and wrath against Jehovah. His 
Assyrian gods (so he said) had given him victory over numerous 
other great kingdoms of the East; he was bold to try their power 
against the God of Israel. His pride got up this mighty issue and 
made it stand out athwart the political sky of the ancient heavens. 
All the civilized nations of that age had their eyes upon this 
stupendous trial of strength between the many gods of Assyria 
and the one God of Israel. And did not the result inure to the 
praise of Israel's God? Ah, did not Jehovah gird about him the 
utmost wrath of Assyria's king and use it as his sword for the 

terrific slaughter of that mighty host ? Such examples fill every 

page of history. Comprehensively we may ask — What has been 
going on upon our earth ever since Satan found his way to it with 
his hellish machinations? Just this: Satan witting, but God out- 
witting; Satan planning, God over-planning; Satan mad, and the 
Most High turning all his mad schemes into confusion, shame, and 
defeat. Every-where and through all time, he who sitteth on high 
has had in derision the most subtle devices of human or Satanic 
wrath, counteracting, prostrating, and converting to glorious good 
what was devised for the utmost evil. All this conspires to the 

glory and praise of God. This truth has bearings both wide 

and rich upon the relations of sin under the moral government 
of God. It shows plainly that God is not and never can be 
alarmed by the presence of sin lest it should get any considerable 
ascendency in his universe. No matter though it rage and burn 
and goad itself into furious wrath ; God knows his own resources. 
He understands how he can not only arrest and curtail this mis- 
chief, but how he can even turn it to great and good account. 
Hence he stands in no fear for either the present or final safety 
of his realm. These views of God's relations to sin should in- 
spire a calm and patient trust in God amid the darkest scenes. 
The present may be the day of Sin's defiant triumph; but let us 
know assuredly that this triumph is only apparent; never can be 
real. Even this appearance of triumph must be transient ; it can 
not last long for God is on his lofty throne and his eyes behold 
all the sons of pride, to abase them in due time. Therefore let 
all who love his name " be as the sun when he goeth forth in his 
might." 

11. Vow, and pay unto the Lord your God : let all that 
be round about him bring presents unto him that ought 
to be feared. 



PSALM LXXVII. 



315 



12. He shall cut off the spirit of princes: he is terrible 
to the kings of the earth. 

The daughter of Zion, saved once more, should bring presents 
to her Great Deliverer, and pay the vows she made in the day of 
her peril. We may hope that King Hezekiah and his people were 
not unmindful of their Great Kedeemer. The last verse sug- 
gests one of the great lessons of those events — the terrible retri- 
bution of the Almighty upon his proud and persistent foes. 

PSALM LXXVII. 

This Psalm, like Ps. 39 and 62, is committed to " Jeduthun." 

See introductory notes to Ps. 39. By general consent critics 

date this Psalm at some point between the revolt of the ten tribes 
and the captivity, some of them favoring a point as early as 
Rehoboam ; others, as late as Josiah. I see nothing in the Psalm 
itself or in its place in the collection, which can determine this 
question. — —The key-note to this Psalm is its antithesis between 
two lines of thought — two diverse views and states of mind : the 
first sketched in vs. 2-9; the second in vs. 11-20. The former 
view rests on some grievous calamity, some events painfully afflic- 
tive, which shake the writer's faith in God sorely and drive him 
almost to despair of further mercy, culminating in those strange 
questionings which appear in vs. 7-9. Then in v. 10, his faith 
rallies ; repels those terrible temptations to despair ; and resolves 
to take a new and different view of God's wonderful deeds in the 
ages past. Here he goes back to more remote events; his mind 
takes a broader range and rests on those great and marvelous 
achievements which had been the glory of Israel's God, especially 
the redemption of his captive people from Egypt, and his wonderful 
manifestations before them in the age of Moses and Aaron. 

1. I cried unto God with my voice, even unto God with 
my voice ; and he gave ear unto me. 

In this verse the writer gives a comprehensive view of the entire 
experience expanded in this Psalm. Having given this in the most 
general way, he proceeds to show how he cried to God — out of 
what depths of affliction and under what pressure of doubt and 
despondency ; and then how he found relief and finally rose to 
exulting triumph. 

2. In the day of my trouble I sought the Lord : my sore 
ran into the night, and ceased not : my soul refused to be 
comforted. 

3. I remembered God, and was troubled : I complained, 
and my spirit was overwhelmed. Selah. 



31G 



PSALM LXXVII. 



As all God's real children should and indeed are wont to do, in 
his day of trouble he sought the Lord. He gave himself to prayer. 

His aching heart turned to God for relief. Xot " my sore," but 

as the English margin suggests, " my hand was stretched forth (in 
the attitude of prayer) and would not let itself down;" "my soul 
refused to be comforted." The uplifted, unflagging hand did not 
become faint or weak (so the verb indicates) ; his soul took on 
grief, gave way to sorrow, and found no comfort. His thoughts of 
Gtfd seemed only to aggravate his trouble and overwhelm his soul. 
Why does God let these terrible calamities come upon me and 
upon Israel ? 

4. Thou holdest mine eyes waking : I am so troubled that 
I can not speak. 

" Thou holdest the lids of mine eyes; " i. e., holdest them open 
so that I can not sleep. " I am so troubled " — literally, so trodden 
down, so pressed as with insulting foot-treads upon me that I can 
not speak. A sense of unmitigated calamity and of overwhelming 
discouragement had broken him utterly down. 

5. I have considered the days of old, the years of ancient 
times. 

6. I call to remembrance my song in the night : I com- 
mune with mine own heart : and my spirit made diligent 
search. 

My mind traveled back to better days. I pondered deeply 
those ancient times and recalled my night-songs when I sang joy- 
ously of God's mercies. But this remembrance of better days 
only served to aggravate his woe. 

7. Will the Lord cast off forever ? and will he be favor- 
able no more ? 

8. Is his mercy clean gone forever? doth his promise fail 
for evermore? 

9. Hath God forgotten to be gracious? hath he in anger 
shut up his tender mercies? Selah. 

Is it for all time that the Lord will cast off as with loathing ? 
Will he add no more manifestations of favor ? Is his mercy at an 

end for ever? These questionings seem to be forced from his lips 

by the dark aspect of these afflictive providences and by the pres- 
sure of despondency under which his soul seemed unable to rise. 

These words paint to the life the bitter experiences which 

many tempted and tried souls have known but too well. Their 
being here in this sacred song does not justify them, nor give 
them any measure of divine sanction. Rather they are here 
because they are sometimes real, and to show us how the most be- 
wildered souls may come forth from such darkness into day; how 
the most perplexed and even despairing may find views of God 



PSALM LXXVII. 



317 



which shall turn their sorrow into joy ; their despair into exulting 
triumph. 

10. And I said, This is my infirmity: but I will remember 
the years of the right hand of the Most High. 

This verse is the transition point from the sad experience to the 
joyous — from dark, depressing views to bright, uplifting thoughts 
of God and his ways. The first clause may be rendered — " And 
then I said, This makes me sick" — this way of thinking sickens 
me. Or the principal word may be taken from another root * 
with the sense, to pierce, bore. This pierces my soul as with 

daggers ; I can not bear it. The last clause is difficult because 

the word which our version represents by " years " may be a verb 
in the sense — to change. f The sense might then be; The change from 
this state is through the right hand of the Most High. He only 
can achieve it; or it can come to me only by turning my thought 
to what his right hand has done. The ultimate sense, it will be 
seen, is substantially the same in this construction as in that of our 
English version which brings forward the verb of the next verse — 
I will recall the years of God's right hand ; i. e., the great achieve- 
ments of those eventful years. It is by no means easy to decide 
between these two methods of etymological derivation; nor is it 
particularly essential to decide, since the ultimate sense varies so 
slightly. 

11. I will remember the works of the Lord: surely I 
will remember thy wonders of old. 

12. I will meditate also of all thy work, and talk of thy 
doings. 

In v. 11, the original has a nice shade of thought which our 
English version fails to give. Though the verb "remember" is 
repeated, it is in what is called another "conjugation" with a 
different form and a modified sense, thus : " I will cause the works 
of the Lord to be remembered, for I will recall [and so recite] 
thy wonders of old." The first clause means, I will celebrate — 
will bring to the notice of men; the second shows how, viz., by 
first recalling them to his own mind. 

13. Thy way, O God, is in the sanctuary: who is so 
great a God as our God? 

The word for "sanctuary"! is used either in this sense, 
the sanctuary; or in the, sense of holiness as the prime dis- 
tinctive quality in God's moral character. The latter must be pre- 
ferred here — (1) Because it gives a better sense; (2) Because this 
passage manifestly alludes to Ex. 15: 11 where the same word is 
used: "Who is like unto Thee, glorious in holiness, fearful in 
praises, doing wonders ? " This manifest allusion demands that the 



EHp$ rr^t V?n* 



318 



PSALM LXXVIL 



same word here should take the same sense as there. Moreover it 
would be difficult to find any pertinent sense for the passage in 
these words — " Thy way is in the temple " — since tile context refers 
to the glorious miracles wrought of God in the redemption of his 
covenant people. But nothing could be more pertinent than to 
say; Thy ways are altogether holy, wrought in pure and perfect 
holiness, i. e., in supreme justice and benevolence — those great 
moral qualities which in their perfection distinguish the Infinite 
God from all the noblest creatures of earth. So also in greatness 
none can compare with him. 

14. Thou art the God that doest wonders : thou hast de- 
clared thy strength among the people. 

15. Thou hast with thine arm redeemed thy people, the 
sons of Jacob and Joseph. Selah. 

Thou art the very God, the only God who performs wonders. 

"Hast declared;" but according to the usage of the Hebrew, not 
in word but in deed; literally, thou hast made known thy power 
among the people. The word for "people" is plural, peoples, and 
therefore must refer to Gentile nations, especially Egypt and the 

Canaanites. " With thy arm," as the history has it, " with a high 

and stretched-out arm," indicating the signal manifestations of thy 
divine power as in the plagues on Egypt and the overthrow of 

Pharaoh's host in the sea. "The sons of Jacob" all the tribes; 

yet specifying the sons of Joseph because both Ephraim and Ma- 
nasseh were prominent tribes, especially Ephraim, and pre-emi- 
nently so during and after the revolt. This allusion to " the sons 
of Joseph " would tacitly suggest that those tribes, then in revolt 
from Judah and from Judah's God, had a common inheritance in 
those glorious works of God wrought in the ancient days for the 

united people. "Sclah; " let each reader pause and dwell on 

this significant fact. 

16. The waters saw thee, O God, the waters saw thee; 
they were afraid : the depths also were troubled. 

Under this grand poetical conception the waters of the Eed Sea 
become instinct with intelligence : they see the awful God and are 
afraid — literally, they writhe in agony. Yea, the great deeps arc 
troubled. The hand of God is upon them in power and with ef- 
fects never known before. How are they startled from their long 
repose ! 

17. The clouds poured out water : the skies sent out a 
sound: thine arrows also went abroad. 

Not only the waters below but the waters above are fearfully 
agitated. The clouds pour forth torrents ; the skies utter a voice ; 
thine arrows [the lightnings] fly to and fro. All the terrific agen- 
cies of the thunder-storm are wrought up to their intensest activ- 
ity." God wields them with his mighty arm! 



PSALM LXXVII. 



319 



18. The voice of thy thunder was in the heaven : the 
lightnings lightened the world : the earth trembled and 
shook. 

Not precisely "in the .heaven," but in the whirlwind. Light- 
nings made the habited world light with more than the splendors 
of day. The earth beneath shook under the crash of thunder- 
bolts, leaping from the hand of the Almighty ! 

19. Thy way is in the sea, and thy path in the great 
waters, and thy footsteps are not known. 

It was only God marching along the sea and making his path- 
way in the great waters, when in his pillar of fire and cloud he 
led the way for the hosts of Israel through the sea. From this 
conception of God it was but an easy transition of thought to say 
that his footsteps leave no trace behind. How soon the waters 
close over those supposed foot-prints of the Almighty ! So the 
majesty and glory of his mighty works, who shall fully compre- 
hend? They are indeed ineffably glorious, and the thought of 
them lifts us up from our despondency and compels us to feel 
that if this Great God is our Friend, we can have nothing to 
fear ; if he be the God of Zion, then Zion is forever safe under 
his wing and strong in his power to save. 

20. Thou leddest thy people like a flock by the hand of 
Moses and Aaron. 

Amid all this terrible enginery of storm and lightning and seas 
rent asunder — fearful to his enemies — there was nothing to alarm 
his trustful friends. Ah no ; for this God was their Shepherd, 
leading them quietly as a flock by the hand of Moses and Aaron. 
All Israel marched safely and joyously through the vacant bed of 
the sea, the mountain masses of water looking down as if standing 
guard over them till they had passed safely through; then did 
they not take on the fury of their power to whelm the enemies 
of God and of his people with unutterable ruin ! 

Now as to the practical application of these inspiring facts, it 
was but a natural and easy inference that this same God must be 
still as mighty to save his people as ever — as strong against his 
enemies in the age of this Psalm, as when he cast Pharaoh and 
all his host into^the depths of the sea as a stone is sunk into the 
mighty waters. The same Great God who never lacked resources 
to humble the proudest nations of the ages long ago may be trusted 
to do all he wills in the ages present or future. That wisdom and 
power which stand out sublimely prominent in the great deeds of 
the ancient times will always be equal to any demand through all 
the ages. His troubled and discouraged people may safely banish 
their fears and give to this Great God their humble confidence 
under, whatever calamities ; through whatever straits. Is any 
thing too hard for such a God ? 



320 



PSALM Lxxvni. 



PSALM LXXVIII. 

This Psalm is pre-eminently a "Maschil — a didactic composition, 
composed for the instruction of the people. Ascribed to Asaph, 
it may have been -written by the father of that family or school, 
contemporary with David, or, like several other Psalms, it may 
have been composed by some of his successors or descendants 
bearing his name. This question turns upon the date of the com- 
position. The general drift and purpose of the Psalm is entirely 

obvious. It recites the great events of Hebrew history, especially 
the plagues on Egypt and the "wanderings and murmurings in the 
wilderness,* for the high moral purpose of putting in the strong 
light of contrast the stupendous achievements of their covenant- 
keeping God in their behalf, coupled with compassionate long- 
suffering, on the one hand; and the frequent murmurings and 
apostasies of his people on the other. Examining the line of 
thought more closely, it becomes apparent that the sacred poet 
purposely gives prominence to the defection of the tribe of Ephraim 
(vs. 9-11, 67), and God's choice of Judah as the leading tribe and 
of David as his servant-king, the founder of the royal family for 
his chosen people. For practical purposes this prominence would 
have been forcibly in point at the juncture when David had been 
placed over the tribe of Judah, but not yet accepted by the other 
tribes. It would have been appropriate also after the revolt under 
Jeroboam, especially while the question was still fresh on the heart 
of the people of both kingdoms, Ephraim and Judah. AVe find an 
argument very similar to the one in this Psalm in 2 Chron. 13 : 4- 
12 — King Abijah of Judah debating with King Jeroboam of 
Ephraim. To the great battle which followed, our Psalm (v. 9) 
may refer. 

liut the precise date of the Psalm is a question of no small 
difficulty. Critics hold diverse opinions. Some locate it during 
the short reign of David over Judah only ; others, soon after the 
scenes narrated 2 Chron. 13, the reign of Abijah, son of Jeroboam ; 
others, during the reign of Hezekiah, supposing it to have been 
designed to aid in his effort to recall the ten tribes into union with 
Judah ; while others on very slender grounds throw it forward past 
the captivity. The " turning back " of the armed men of Ephraim 
in the day of battle (v. 9), alluded to as a signal and well known 
event, favors the date of Abijah' s reign, yet it may possibly refer 
to events in the administration of Jephthah (Judg. 12: 1-6), or of 
other Judges (Judg. 1 : 27, 29). If the allusion to the " sanctuary " 
(v. 69) indicated the temple on Moriah decisively, in distinction 
from the tabernacle on Mt. Zion, then the later date must be 
accepted ; but this word is often applied to the tabernacle. The 
allusions (v. 60, 61) to Shiloh and the events narrated 1 Sam. 4, 
favor the earlier date ; and finally, the entire absence of allusion 
to the great events of the reign of David and to God s most won- 
derful indorsement of his reign by subduing before him all the 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



321 



ancient enemies of Israel, seem to me to favor strongly the earlier 
date. The staple events of history in the body of the Psalm belong 
to the period of Moses and Joshua down to the earlier years of 
David. If the author had lived in the age of Abijah or of Heze- 
kiah, it is at least highly probable that events later than these 
would have found place in the Psalm, especially because they 

would have sustained his main points strongly. The striking 

thought with which Ps. 77 closes (v. 20) appears in this Psalm (vs. 
52, 53, 70-72) — a fact which may account for placing them in such 
proximity. 

1. Give ear, O niy people, to my law : incline your ears 
to the words of my mouth. 

2. I will open my mouth in a parable : I will utter dark 
sayings of old : 

3. Which we have heard and known, and our fathers 
have told us. 

Appropriately the Psalmist first calls attention to what he is 
about to say. "My law" — but in the sense here of moral in- 
struction. " A parable " — here only a series of illustrations of 

great moral truths, drawn not from his imagination, but from 
historic facts. The history of God's dealings with ancient Israel 
and of their behavior toward God is made to teach great moral 

lessons. The Hebrew word for "dark sayings" has often the 

sense of a riddle, enigma: here it refers to the deeper significance 
of God's ways toward men which he brings out in this Psalm. 

(See Ps. 49: 4). They "are of old" inasmuch as the historic 

facts transpired long ago, in the days of the fathers and founders 
of their nation. 

4. We will not hide them from their children, showing to 
the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and his 
strength, and his w T onderful works that he hath done. 

"We will not hide them from their children;" but in the spirit 
of the Mosaic law and from the impulses of our own parental 
heart, will testify of those great works of God wrought for his 
people. The Psalmist remembered the injunction: "Take heed 
lest thou forget the things which thine eyes have seen and lest they 
depart from thy heart all the days of thy life; but teach them thy 
son's sons," etc. (Deut. 4: 9). "Teach them diligently unto thy 
children and talk of them when thou sittest in thy house." etc. 
(Deut. 6 : 7). 

5. For he established a testimony in Jacob, and appointed 
a law in Israel, which he commanded our fathers, that they 
should make them known to their children : 

6. That the generation to come might know them, even 



322 



PSALM LXXVHL 



the children ivhich should be born ; who should arise and 
declare them to their children : 

7. That they might set their hope in God, and not forget 
the works of God, but keep his commandments : 

8. And might not be as their fathers, a stubborn and 
rebellious generation ; a generation that set not their heart 
aright, and whose spirit was not steadfast with God. 

All these points are plain — that God gave their fathers a code 
of civil law quite complete, and also a system of religious services, ' 
to be enjoined carefully upon their children after them, and by 
them upon their children onward through future ages — all for the 
high purpose of leading them to set their hope in God and abide 
in true-hearted obedience. 

9. The children of Ephraim, being armed, and carryiDg 
bows, turned back in the day of battle. 

10. They kept not the covenant of God, and refused to 
walk in his law ; 

11. And forgat his works, and his wonders that he had 
showed them. 

As suggested in the introductory remarks on this Psalm, it is 
not easy to determine what particular " turning back " of the bow- 
men of Ephraim is here referred to. The tribe was characteris- 
tically populous and proud, envious of the supremacy of Judah, and 
less faithful to their covenant with God. The/ appear badly in 
the history of Jephthah (Judg. 12 : 1-6), and also in the times of 
Gideon (Judg. 8 : 1-3). They experienced a most signal defeat 
when under Jeroboam they joined battle with Abijah king of Ju- 
dah, as recorded 2 Chron. 13. The slaughter of that fearful day 
was terrible and its moral lessons thrilling. But for the fact that 
certain other things strongly favor an earlier date, the remarkable 
prominence of that defeat and slaughter would seem to indicate 
it as the event referred to here. 

12. Marvelous things did he in the sight of their fathers, 
in the land of Egypt, in the field of Zoan. 

Zoan, called by the Greeks Tanis, was long the capital of 
Lower Egypt, on one of the eastern arms of the Nile, and near 
the land of Goshen ; probably the residence of the Pharaoh of 
Moses' time. 

13. He divided the sea, and caused them to pass 
through ; and he made the waters to stand as a heap. 

Of this most memorable event, the history is given Ex. 14, the 
commemorative song, Ex. 15 : 1-21. In the words of the history, 
" the waters were a wall unto them on their right hand and on their 
left" (14: 22) ; in the loftier strains of poetry, " with the blast of 
thy nostrils the waters were gathered together; the floods stood 



PSALM LXXVIIL 



323 



upright as an heap, and the depths were congealed in the heart 
of the sea" (Ex. 15 : 8). 

14. In the daytime also he led them with a cloud, and 
all the night with a light of fire. 

This miraculous manifestation of God's presence seems to have 
appeared immediately upon their leaving Egypt, " when they came 
to Ethan in the edge of the wilderness." As described in the his- 
tory (Ex. 13 : 20-22) : "The Lord went before them by day in a 
pillar of a cloud to lead them the way, and by night in a pillar 
of fire to give them light, to go by day and by night." It is 
spoken of as the presence of God's "angel" (Ex. 14: 40) and con- 
tinued through all their wilderness journeyings (Ex. 40 : 38). 
After the consecration of the tabernacle, this cloud rested upon 
it, being lifted up and moving forward as the signal for the march 
of Israel's host; resting again as the signal for their halting (Num. 
9; 15-23, and 10: 33-36). It was God's witness not to Israel 
only but to other nations of his abiding presence arnon^ his peo- 
ple (Num. 14: 13, 14). Nehemiah attributes it to God's "mani- 
fold mercies" that under the "great provocations" of his people, 
God did not forsake them in the wilderness, never allowing the 
pillar of the cloud to "depart from them by day nor the pillar of 
fire by night to show them light and the way they should go" 
(Neh. 9 : 18, 19). 

15. He clave the rocks in the wilderness, and gave them % 
drink as out of the great depths. 

16. He brought streams also out of the rock, and caused 
waters to run down like rivers. 

With no exaggeration the poet uses the plural "rocks;" "he 
clave the rocks in the wilderness," since the history records two 
signal instances : the first at Rephidim (Ex. 17 : 1-6) during the 
first year of their wanderings ; and the second at Kadesh (Num. 
20 : 1-11) during the last year of the forty. Both the history and 
the song represent the quantity of water produced as very great, 
amply sufficient for the supply of three millions of people with all 
their cattle. Another reference to this miracle (Ps. 105 : 41) sus- 
tains this view of the great supply: "He opened the rock and the 

waters gushed out; they ran in the dry places like a river." 

How long this supply in these cases continued is not said ; but we 

may assume it to have been as long as the demand. Those who 

are able to appreciate the intense suffering in the desert for want 
of water, and the utter helplessness of a vast caravan like this — 
a nation of people moving slowly along through a desert almost 
utterly destitute of water — may form some conception of the 
wealth of such a blessing — rivers of gushing water from a smit- 
ten rock — enough and more than enough for all ! Is it not strange 
that, after having drank of these waters to their heart's supply, 
they should not thenceforward and forever have believed in God? 



324 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



This is precisely the thought which the Psalmist proceeds to 
suggest. 

17. And they sinned yet more against him by provoking 
the Most High in the wilderness. 

18. And they tempted God in their heart by asking meat 
for their lust. 

19. Yea, they spake against God ; they said, Can God 
furnish a table in the wilderness ? 

20. Behold, he smote the rock, that the waters gushed 
out, and the streams overflowed ; can he give bread, also ? 
can he provide flesh for his people ? 

"They sinned yet more against him;" they added yet other sin 
by murmuring about their food. This sin was aggravated by rea- 
son of the great mercy shown them in such a gift of water. " They 
tempted God" in the sense of trying him exceedingly by clamor- 
ing for food to gratify their appetite. They said, " Our soul loath eth 
this light bread." "Yea, they spake against God" — in causeless 
and guilty reflection against his power ; for they said, " Is God — 
even El, the Mighty God — able to spread a table here in this wil- 
derness ? We know he smote the rock and brought forth rivers of 
water; but water is not bread: Is he able to give bread also?" 
The word "can" in vs. 19, 20 translates the Hebrew verb of 
power : Has God the power — is he able to do this thing ? Will he 
provide flesh for his people? — for this was what their appetite 

specially craved. These verses obviously allude to the scenes 

of lusting for flesh at Taberah, recorded Xum. 14, when God 
brought up quails from the sea covering their camp for a whole 
day's journey round about, but visited their sin with his swift 
judgment — as often happens under the two-fold operation of na- 
tural law and of divine and special retribution — to which the next 
verse refers. 

21. Therefore the Lord heard this, and was wroth : so 
a fire was kindled against Jacob, and anger also came up 
against Israel; 

22. Because they believed not in God, and trusted not 
in his salvation : 

23. Though he had commanded the clouds from above, 
and opened the doors of heaven, 

24. And had rained down manna upon them to eat, and 
had given them of the corn of heaven. 

25. Man did eat angels' food : he sent them meat to the 
full. 

These questionings of unbelief and complaint against God were 
the more grievous to him for these two reasons, viz.: (1) That he 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



ha«J given them water miraculously in ample supply; and (2) that 
during all the years of their desert life, he had fed them with 
manna, thus supplying their bread almost without labor on their 
part. He had given his special commission to the clouds from 
above and had opened the doors of heaven to rain down upon 
them this bread of heaven — this food from the home of the 
angels — for this seems to be what is meant by "angel's food" — 
literally, the bread of the mighty ones. It is not well to assume 
that the angels subsist on food like ourselves; much less that they 
live on precisely such bread as the Hebrew manna. The de- 
mands of poetry are better met by assuming that "heaven" here 
is the lower heaven — the atmosphere above us; and that this 
heaven is thought of as the home, the realm, of the angels. The 
bread of the Hebrews, therefore, was not " of the earth, earthy," 
but from the heaven above, to be associated, therefore, with angelic 
life — the last thing that men should despise. The historic ac- 
count of this manna appears in Ex. 16: and Num. 11: 7-9. It 
fell after and upon the dew of the evening ; was gathered in the 
morning after the dew had evaporated ; in form like coriander 
seed, to be ground and baked in cakes for bread ; its taste as fresh 
oil or like wafers mixed with honey. Every thing about it was 
miraculous — a fact doubly evinced by these special points, viz. : 
that it fell regularly on six mornings and not on the seventh; that 
the fall of each of the first five days would keep only one day, 
while the fall of the sixth day was double in amount and wouid 
keep two days — thus supplying their Sabbath wants without Sab- 
bath labor ; and lastly, that a pot full, laid up as a memorial be- 
fore the Lord, was kept in perfect preservation for ages. Thus 
God supplied subsistence for this host of his people during their 
forty years of wandering in the wilderness. It was to the glory 
of his name that he thus evinced his infinite resources to feed his 
people in a barren, desolate wilderness — a most suggestive proof 
of analogous resources to sustain his people spiritually with the 
bread of life that comes down from the real heaven. It was the 
shame and guilt of ancient Israel that even while they were eating 
this manna and the nation had been subsisting upon it for a long 
time, they still did not and would not believe that God could fur- 
nish flesh for so great a people. It was their shame that they 
should demand it; their damning guilt that with all the light be- 
fore their minds they would not oelieve in God's willingness and 
power to give them in abundance whatever change of food they 
might really need. 

26. He caused an east wind to blow in the heaven : and 
by his power he brought in the south wind. 

27. He rained flesh also upon them as dust, and feathered 
fowls like as the sand of the sea : 

28. And he let it fall in the midst of their camp, round 
about their habitations. 



326 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



29. So they did eat, and were well filled : for lie gave 
them their own desire; 

30. They were not estranged from their lust : but while 
their meat was yet in their mouths, 

31. The wrath of God came upon them, and slew the 
fattest of them, and smote down the chosen men of Israel. 

This is a full account of the miraculous supply of flesh to "which 
vs. 18-22 allude. The intervening allusion to the manna (vs. 
23-25) comes in there to show the special aggravation of their 
guilt — that with the manna in their hands, they could yet deny 
God's power to give them flesh in ample supply if he had seen it 

best to do so. The history shows that God sent them quails on two 

distinct occasions; the first in connection with the first manna 
(Ex. 16: 6, 7, 12, 13) ; and the second at Taberah (otherwise and 
afterward called Kibroth-hattaavah) as narrated Num. 11 : 4-34. 
In this latter case the judgment of God fell heavily upon the peo- 
ple while yet the flesh was between their teeth (Num. 11: 33). 
And yet the survivors seem to have continued to eat of this mi- 
raculous supply of flesh, not one day only, nor two days, but a 
whole month, until it became loathsome (vs. 19, 20). The marvel 
is that the sudden smiting of the people with a " very great 
plague" should have had so little moral impression upon the sur- 
vivors. Was it that this national passion for flesh had become a 
madness— a furor that made them blind to the tokens of God's 
displeasure ? 

32. For all this they sinned still, and believed not for 
his wondrous works. 

33. Therefore their days did he consume in vanity, and 
their years in trouble. 

Their persistent unbelief despite of the presence of perpetual 
miracles, and the somewhat frequent recurrence of those which 
were new and fresh, are the strong points made in this Psalm. 
Similar depravity is a fearful fact in the human life of every age. 
It stands here a suggestive rebuke to the men of all time that in 
the very presence of most impressive testimonies of God's love and 
power they are still so slow of heart to believe in his love and to 

trust his power to save. The Hebrew nation doomed to wander 

forty years up and down, back and forth,- in that waste, dreary 
wilderness consuming their days in vanity and their years in 
trouble, are God's witnesses to the guilt of such sin, suggesting 
how the unbelief of professed Christians dooms them to barren- 
ness and desolation during the many years of their earthly pil- 
grimage; while in their Father's house is bread enough and to 
spare and their earthly life might just as well be spent in the land 
of promise, flowing with milk and honey. 

34. When he slew them, then they sought him : and 
they returned and inquired early after God. 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



327 



35. And they remembered that God ivas their Rock, and 
the high God their Redeemer. 

Yet the judgments of God were not altogether in vain. On 
some hearts they fell impressively and brought forth the desired 

moral fruit. "Inquired early" a word which seems to couple 

the two ideas, early and earnestly. What men rise early in the 
morning to do, they do with a will, in the true earnestness of the 
heart. 

36. Nevertheless they did flatter him with their mouth, 
and they lied unto him with their tongues. 

37. For their heart was not right with him, neither were 
they steadfast in his covenant. 

We need not apply these words to all the people ; yet they 
were but too painfully true of the greater part, especially of the 
fathers who came out of Egypt under Moses. Their hearts were 
never true to God's covenant. Impressed by fearful judgments 
they promised fairly, but full soon went back on their promises 
and " lied unto God with their tongues." 

38. But he, being fall of compassion, forgave their ini- 
quity, and destroyed them not : yea, many a time turned he 
his anger away, and did not stir up all his wrath. 

39. For he remembered that they were but flesh; a wind 
that passeth away, and cometh not again. 

Those historic events afford a lively illustration of the divine 
qualities suggested here— deep compassion in view of human guilt ; 
infinite readiness to forgive the penitent ; turning away his anger 
and giving it but little scope compared with the ill-desert which he 
must notice and rebuke ; and finally, making large account of hu- 
man frailty, remembering that man is but flesh, encompassed with 
temptations that are mighty and having but feeble power to with- 
stand them. Such have always been God's marvelous ways of 
mercy toward our sinning race ! 

40. How oft did they provoke him in the wilderness, and 
grieve him in the desert. 

41. Yea, they turned back and tempted God, and limi- 
ted the Holy One of Israel. 

"How oft" is the very impression which will be made on the 
mind of every reader of the history given by Moses of the wil- 
derness life of Israel. "Turned back," i. e., from God into mur- 
muring and rebellion. The Hebrew word for "limited," of very 

rare occurrence, and therefore of somewhat doubtful meaning, is 
supposed by the best critical authorities to mean grieved, or more 
precisely, they surprised, astonished him by their perversity ; by 
their strange, unaccountable depravity. Alexander translates : 



328 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



" They set a mark on the Holy One of Israel," treating him con- 
temptuously. The Lexicons and other critical authorities follow 
the analogy of cognate languages. The resulting sense — grieved, 
astonished — is at least appropriate. 

42. They remembered not his hand, nor the day when 
he delivered them from the enemy. 

43. How he had wrought his signs in Egypt, and his 
wonders in the field of Zoan : 

44. And had turned their rivers into blood ; and their 
floods, that they could not drink. 

This was another point in their great guilt that they did not re- 
member the mighty hand of God, put forth so signally for their 
deliverance from Egypt. That "day" of their redemption from 
Egypt — a day that should have been never forgotten — they practi- 
cally forgot, and lived, thought, and felt, as if it had never been ! 

The Psalmist now proceeds to recite the plagues brought on 

Egypt by God's mighty hand for the rescue of his chosen people. 

"He turned their rivers;" literally, the streams of their 

Nile, the one great river of Egypt, which however in Lower 
Egypt is disparted into many, and reaches the great sea through 
many mouths. The word here is the usual Egyptian name of the 

Nile. It was a terrible judgment — all their waters, blood ; their 

proud river, the boast and glory, the wealth and life of their land — 
nothing but blood ! The parallel Psalm and the history also 
add— "And slew their fish" (Ps. 105: 29, and Ex. 7: 20, 21). 

45. He sent divers sorts of flies among them, which de- 
voured them ; and frogs, which destroyed them. 

46. He gave also their increase unto the caterpillar, and 
their labour unto the locust. 

On the question whether there were "diverse sorts of flies" or 
only one sort, the ancient Jewish doctors held the former view, as 
expressed in our English version; most of the recent critics hold 
the latter. The same word * appears both in the history (Ex. 8 : 
21, 22, etc.) and here. It is now supposed to refer to the gadfly, 
alias dogfly, so called for his impudence, scorpion-like stinging 

men and beasts, also sucking their blood. Moses narrates the 

plague of frogs Exod. 8: 1-15; of locusts, Ex. 10: 12-19. The 
"caterpillar" is here only another name for the locust — for which 
animal the Hebrews had many names [Joel gives four in the same 
connection]. The word rendered "caterpillar" means the " de- 
vourer ; " that for locust means, the countless ones, the animal that 
comes in immense numbers. 

47. He destroyed their vines with hail, and their syca- 
more trees with frost. 



any* 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



329 



48. He gave up their cattle also to the hail, and their 
flocks to hot thunderbolts. 

The word for "frost" seems to mean hail-stones. For the plague 
of hail, see Ex. 9: 18-33. In a country where even rain is almost 
unknown, and hail and thunder are of even more rare occurrence, 
this plague must have been fearfully appalling. 

49. He cast upon them the fierceness of his anger, wrath, 
and indignation, and trouble, by sending evil angels among 
them. 

"Evil angels;" literally, angels of evil — messengers who bore 
calamity as the burden of their message. These material plagues — 
frogs, flies, locusts, hail and thunderbolts, etc., might by a figure 
of speech be called God's angels— his ministers of evil sent on 
Egypt; or the sense may be that God employed the ministry of his 
angels in sending these plagues. The Bible gives us cases of this 
sort; e. g., 2 Sam. 24: 16, and Isa. 37: 36. In all these cases, God 
employed good, not bad angels — "evil" only in the sense that they 
bore calamities, not blessings. 

50. He made a way to his anger ; he spared not their soul 
from death, but gave their life over to the pestilence ; 

51. And smote all the firstborn in Egypt; the chief of 
their strength in the tabernacles of Ham : 

Last of all came that most fearful plague which spared not one 
of the first-born of Egypt from the throne to the dunghill, leaving 
not a house where there was not one dead ! Then the might of 
Jehovah conquered and Egypt's proud and long hardened king 
succumbed. 

52. But made his own people to go forth like sheep, and 
guided them in the wilderness like a flock. 

53. And he led them on safely, so that they feared not: 
but the sea overwhelmed their enemies. 

To a people so familiar with shepherd life, no analogy could be 
more apt, suggestive, perfect, than this : God leading this nation 
forth from Egypt and onward through the wilderness as a shepherd 
does his flock, carefully, lovingly, safely. 

54. And he brought them to the border of his sanctuary, 
even to this mountain, which his right hand had purchased. 

He brought them safely through to his own holy land of promise, 
and especially to this Mount, i. e., Zion, acquired by his own 
strong arm. 

55. He cast out the heathen also before them, and divided 
them an inheritance by line, and made the tribes of Israel to 
dwell in their tents. 



330 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



The " heathen " are the nations of ancient Canaan. " Divided 

to them an inheritance by line, 1 ' alludes to the definite assignment 

of territory by accurate survey as done by Joshua. The tribes 

of Israel were then made to dwell, not in their own tents, but in 
those of the original Canaanites. 

56. Yet they tempted and provoked the most high God, 
and kept not his testimonies : 

57. But turned back, and dealt unfaithfully like their 
fathers : they were turned aside like a deceitful bow. 

58. For they provoked him to anger with their high 
places, and moved him to jealousy with their graven images. 

It was the great aggravation of their sin that it was against the 

Most High God. " Like a deceitful bow " which throws its arrow 

aside the mark, disappointing the rational expectation of the 

archer. " High places " — beautiful, enchanting for situation, 

where idol-worship could be invested with every sensuous attrac- 
tion. The cultured but most corrupt nations of Canaan seem to 
have led the nations of Western Asia in these artful appliances for 
idolatry. 

59. When God heard this, he was wroth, and greatly 
abhorred Israel : 

60. So that he forsook the tabernacle of Shiloh, the tent 
which he placed among men ; 

61. And delivered his strength into captivity, and his 
glory into the enemy's hand. 

The reference to Shiloh serves to connect these verses with the 
history given in 1 Sam. 4 — the scenes of the death of Eli and of his 
sons ; the capture of the ark by the Philistines, which ark seems 
here to be indicated as "his strength" and "his glory " — consigned 
to captivity and to the enemies' hands. Those sons of Eli were an 
outrage on the priesthood, too base to be endured. They brought 
a curse not on themselves alone, but on the nation. 

62. He gave his people over also unto the sword ; and 
was wroth with his inheritance. 

63. The fire consumed their young men ; and their 
maidens were not given to marriage. 

The history records on this occasion a "very great slaughter" — 

the fall of " thirty thousand footmen of Israel " (1 Sam. 4 : 10). 

In the last clause of v. 63, one reading gives us — " Their maidens 
were not praised," i. e., no nuptial songs were sung to their praise 
on their marriage festival ; while another reading would mean, 
Their maidens were not bewailed. The former has the preference. 

64. Their priests fell by the sword ; and their widows 
made no lamentation. 



PSALM LXXVIII. 



This seems to allude specially to the fall of Hophni and Phineas, 
slain in this bloody slaughter. That " their widows made no 
lamentation " may be due to their being absorbed in their personal 
peril, or, as some suppose, to the fact that the bodies of the slain 
were not recovered and therefore no funeral obsequies were held. 

65. Then the Lord awaked as one out of sleep, and like 
a mighty man that shouteth by reason of wine. 

66. And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts : he 
put them to a perpetual reproach. 

This extremity became God's opportunity. Such emergencies 
demand his interposition for the glory of his own name. He is 
represented forcibly as a mighty man awaking from sleep, or 
exhilarated with wine. From this point the glory of the Philis- 
tines began to wane ; their prestige gave place to growing failure 
and disgrace. 

67. Moreover he refused the tabernacle of Joseph, and 
chose not the tribe of Ephraim : 

68. But chose the tribe of Judah, the mount Zion which 
he loved. 

But these victories over Philistia were not achieved by Ephraim, 
but rather by Judah and her representative son David. Ephraim 
lost her pre-eminence among the tribes : Judah arose to this posi- 
tion, and God located the sacred ark on Mt. Zion. This fact 
brings out one of the purposed political lessons of the Psalm — that 
God chose Judah, David, and Mt. Zion before Ephraim and Shiloh, 
a choice therefore which all the tribes were bound to recognize 
and accept. 

69. And he built his sanctuary like high palaces, like the 
earth which he hath established forever. 

The Italic word supplied — " palaces "• — were better read places, 
this being the exact sense of the original. Some critics, induced 
by the supposed antithesis with "earth" in the last clause, render 
this the heavens; but the word legitimately means only high places, 
mountains. God built his sanctuary stable as the mountains, fixed 
as the earth which he has founded for the ages. This is in con- 
trast with the ark migratory from place to place as in the period 
from Shiloh to its location on the hill of Zion. 

70. He chose David also his servant, and took him from 
the sheepfolds : 

71. From following the ewes great with young he brought 
him to feed Jacob his people, and Israel his inheritance. 

72. So he fed them according to the integrity of his heart ; 
and guided them by the skillfulness of his hands. 

The general cast of these verses implies that David was then 



332 



PSALM LXXIX. 



living and reigning. Especially is this implied by the tense of the 
last verb which is future — " And will guide them by the skill of his 

hands." This fact bears upon the date of this Psalm. Thus 

David from being a skillful shepherd of flocks became the no less 
skillful pastor-king of God's covenant people. Let all the tribes 
accept God's choice, and let the great moral lessons of the past 
history of God's people avail to warn them against forsaking the 
God of their fathers, and hold them to grateful, unswerving loyalty 
to their glorious King! 

PSALM LXXIX. 

This Psalm seems to date with Ps. 74, based on the same his- 
toric events, viz., the destruction of Jerusalem and the profanation 
of its holy temple by the Chaldeans. Some critics locate it in the 
reign of Manasseh. Too little is known of the shedding of blood 
in and about the city, and of the damage done to the city in con- 
nection with the capture of Manasseh himself, to enable us either to 
affirm or deny on this point with any considerable certainty. We 
do know however that such facts as are assumed in this Psalm 
are fully certified as occurring at the final destruction of the city 

by the Chaldeans. As to Manasseh, the writer of his history 

in the book of King3 (2 Kings 21 : 1-18) makes no allusion to his 
captivity — none to any destruction of the city during his reign. 
The writer in Chronicles (2 Chron. 33 : 11) states that "the Lord 
brought upon the people the captains of the host of the king of 
Assyria who took Manasseh among the thorns and bound him 
with fetters and brought him to Babylon." Nothing is said here 
of a general slaughter of the people or of the destruction of the 
city. It is therefore more in harmony with known history to as- 
sume the reference of this Psalm to the destruction of the city by 
the Chaldeans. 

1. O God, the heathen are come into thine inheritance; 
thy holy temple have they defiled; they have laid Jerusa- 
lem on heaps. 

" The heathen," the usual word for foreign nations hostile to 
Israel. "Thine inheritance," the land of Canaan which God had 
for ages claimed and held as his own. " They have defiled thine 
holy temple." If the question arise, Why did not the Psalmist 
use the stronger word " destroyed " if such were really the case ? 
it may be answered that to the pious Israelite destruction was no 
worse than desecration. Desecration was the first and chief af- 
fliction. " They have laid Jersalem on heaps," the exact sense 

of the original being: They have put Jerusalem into heaps of 
ruins — have made it such. In Jer. 52 : 13, 14, it is said : " They 
burned the house of the Lord and the king's house, and all the 
houses of Jerusalem, and all the houses of the great men burned 



PSALM LXXIX. 



333 



they with fire, and brake down all the walls of Jerusalem round 
about." 

2. The dead bodies of thy servants have they given to be 
meat unto the fowls of the heaven, the flesh of thy saints 
unto the beasts of the earth. 

3. Their blood have they shed like water round about 
Jerusalem ; and there ivas none to bury tliem. 

These are points of the sorest affliction — the shedding of blood 
like water round about the holy city ; human bodies left unburied 
to be devoured by beasts and birds of prey, and especially that 
these slain and unburied men were God's servants, his saints. 
Surely God will hear such plaints of sorrow from his surviving 
people. Jeremiah's prophetic fore warnings of this calamity in- 
cluded the lack of burial, which to the ancient oriental mind was 
of all things most dreadful (Jer. 14 : 16, and 16 : 4). 

4. We are become a reproach to our neighbors, a scorn 
and derision to them that are round about us. 

The poets and prophets of Israel, jealous for the honor of God 
before the world, felt this point most keenly — the reproach brought 
on God's chosen people, and by implication upon their God, when 
their heathen enemies were victorious over them. See Lam. 5 : 
1, and 2: 15, 16, and Ezra 9 : 6, 7. 

5. How long, Lord ? wilt thou be angry forever ? shall 
thy jealousy burn like fire ? 

Precisely the question which heavy calamity naturally extorts : 
how long f When will it end ? The question involves the prayer, 
O Lord, let it end speedily ! 

6. Pour out thy wrath upon the heathen that have not 
known thee, and upon the kingdoms that have not called 
upon thy name. 

7. For they have devoured Jacob, and laid waste his 
dwelling-place. 

Rather let thy wrath fall on thine enemies who have never 
known or worshiped thee, for are they not guilty of cruel wrong ? 
See how they have devoured thy people ["Jacob"] and their 
homes. Surely thou art the righteous King of nations and will 
requite such wickedness. Nearly the same words occur Jer. 
10 : 25. 

8. O remember not against us former iniquities : let thy 
tender mercies speedily prevent us ; for we are brought very 
low. 

"Former iniquities," or rather, the iniquities of former genera- 
tions, for this seems to be more precisely the sense of the 
15 



334 



PSALM LXXIX. 



original: " the iniquities of them that were before us." This cap- 
tivity had been repeatedly attributed to the sins of Manasseh (2 
Kings 24 : 2-4, and 21 : 10-16, and 23 : 26, 27). Sinning against 
the light of a pious father's example, and under the fresh mani- 
festations of God's glorious arm saving his city and people from 
the Assyrian hosts, no one of all the wicked kings of Judah had 
so provoked the Lord. His name deserved to be made prominent 
as having brought on Judah this sweeping ruin. The sufferers 
pining under their chains in Babylon might fitly pray as here. 
Spare us any further infliction for sins perpetrated by former gen- 
erations. ct Prevent,'* in the sense of anticipate; come in be- 
tween us and the calamities that still impend. 

9. Help us, O God of our salvation, for the glory of 
thy name : and deliver us, and purge away our sins, for 
thy name's sake. 

The only plea that could be made, for it were vain to plead, 
"We have not sinned ; vain to urge, This suffering is greater than 
our deserts. But they could say : "We are thy professed people ; 
thy name is implicated in our destiny ; have regard therefore to 

the honor of thy name and save us. A similar plea all sinners 

are permitted to use, thus : It is the glory of God to show mercy, 
to forgive the sins of penitent souls who place themselves within 
the pale of the pardoning mercy offered in Christ. They may 
therefore plead with God: "Help us, O God of our salvation, for 
the glory of thy name." The very epithet, God of our salvation, 
implies that God has in a sense committed himself to save those 
who truly seek his mercy. " Purge away our sins," is in He- 
brew " cover," the standard word for making atonement, the sense 
being: Put out of thy sight, exclude from thine own view; regard 
us no longer as sinners before thee. 

10. Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is their 
God ? let him be known among the heathen in our sight by 
the revenging of the blood of thy servants which is shed. 

Wherefore should the heathen have occasion to say, Where is 
their God? They have had a God who has sometimes shown him- 
self mighty to save his people ; where is he now ? What has hap- 
pened that He is their Savior no more ? In the last clause the 

word "by" in italics has no corresponding word in Hebrew. The 
revenging, or better, avenging, is therefore probably to be taken as* 
the subject of the verb, thus: Let the avenging of the blood of thy 
servants be known among the heathen in our sight; let us see it, 
and let the heathen also know it. 

11. Let the sighing of the prisoner come up before thee; 
according to the greatness of thy power preserve thou those 
that are appointed to die ; 

12. And render unto our neighbors seven-fold into their 



PSALM LXXX. 



335 



bosom their reproach, wherewith they have reproached thee, 
O Lord. 

The "prisoners" contemplate the whole captive people in politi- 
cal bondage. Let their groans come up before thee, 0 God, as the 
groans of one man, and then according to the greatness of thine 
arm (so the Hebrew) preserve alive the sons of death ; cause to 
survive those who are bound over to death, and must die unless 
thou interpose. Then turn back upon themselves in sevenfold 
measure the reproach which thy Chaldean enemies have sought to 

heap upon thee. "Into their own bosom," or as we might say, 

turn back upon their own heads or upon themselves. The bosom 
is named with reference to the oriental usage of making a large 
reservoir or pocket with the folds of their outer garment or vail as 
in the case of Ruth (3 : 15) which might hang at the bosom. Into 
this the Psalmist supposes the reproach to be figuratively poured. 
It is quite noticeable that pouring into the bosom became with the 
Orientals the proverbial phrase to express recompense, retribution, 
whether of good or eviL See Isa. 65 : 6, 7, and Jer. 32 : 18, and 

Luke 8: 38. The ignoble fall of Babylon before God's servant 

Cyrus was a striking answer to this prayer. How did their long 
famed valor and prowess vanish away in a drunken debauch and 
in the midst of their impious mockery of Israel's sanctuary and 
Israel's God! 

13. So we thy people and sheep of thy pasture will give 
thee thanks forever : we will show forth thy praise to all 
generations. 

For this crowning mercy, this salvation of thy covenant people 
from national ruin, how will we, thy covenant people and the sheep 
of thy pasture, give thee thanks forever ! It shall be to thy glory 
and praise onward thro*gh all generations. 

PSALM LXXX. 

In this Psalm the unusual words, "Upon Shoshannim-Eduth," 
give us no aid in locating the Psalm in history and nothing deci- 
sive as to its object or significance. "Shoshannim" occurs also 
in the caption of Ps. 45 and 69; "Eduth" in the caption of Ps. 
60. The former has usually the sense of lilies ; the latter of law, 
or more strictly testimony. In the present case some critics find 
under these words the choir of musicians ; others, the instruments 
employed; others still, take them as common, not proper nouns, 
and think that their usual significance hints at the scope of the 
Psalm. Conjectures on this point are of small account; nothing 
can be certainly known. 

The subject and aim of this Psalm are in general clear. Israel, 



336 PSALM LXXX. 



thought of as a vine, transplanted from Egypt to Canaan, and long 
time prosperous there, has now been sadly damaged ; the enclos- 
ing protecting hedge around her broken down; the wild beasts 
tearing her tendrils, plucking her fruit, and trampling it under 
foot ; the fire has done its fearful work of destruction upon her. 
The Psalm is a prayer to God for help in this emergency — its 
thrice recurring refrain (vs. 3, 7, 19) giving this key-note: "Turn 

us again; let thy face shine; so shall we be saved." If now 

we ask for the historic point to which this Psalm alludes we have 
to choose between the overthrow of the Northern kingdom by the 
Assyrians, on the one hand, and the fall of the Southern kingdom 
before the Chaldeans, on the other. The former alternative may 
be so far modified as to include the preceding inroads of Syria 
upon the Northern kingdom to which sacred history makes several 
allusions; e.g., 2 Kings 8: 12, and 10: 32, 33, and 12: 17, and 

13 : 3, 7, 22. The special allusion (v. 2) to Ephraim, Benjamin, 

and Manasseh, and the probable allusion (v. 17) to Benjamin 
("man of the right hand") make it highly probable, almost cer- 
tain, that the Psalm contemplates the fall of the ten tribes, and is 
a public prayer, set to music, for God's gracious interposition un- 
der this great national and religious calamity. At least we must 
say such an occasion called for such a prayer. The pious men 
of Judah ought, under those circumstances, to have prayed and 
sung according to this Psalm: every word is appropriate' to their 
case. Therefore we may safely assume its reference to that event, 
written to meet the wants of the worshiping congregations in view 
of that calamity. 

1. Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, thou that leadest 
Joseph like a flock ; thou that dwellest betiveen the cheru- 
bim, shine forth. 

This address to God as "Shepherd of Israel" was exquisitely 
pertinent here, suggesting his relations to all Israel and intimating 
that he should not be content to see ten parts in eleven of his fold 
blotted out, utterly lost. There may perhaps be a tacit allusion 
also to the fact that his under shepherd was David and that it be- 
hooved him to hear the prayer of David's tribe and of those who 
still adhered to the king of David's line — that he would spare 

and restore the other tribes. The name "Joseph" may include 

the whole nation or only the ten tribes of which Ephraim was 
foremost. In the former case it is simply parallel to " Israel;" in 
the latter it carries a special allusion to the ten tribes. The 

former is the more probable. "Dwellest between the cherubims ;" 

literally, "the Sitter of Cherubims," i. e., the One enthroned upon 

the mercy-seat beneath the out-spread wings of the Cherubim. 

The offered prayer is — " sbine forth" benignantly ; reveal the light 
of thy presence and the glory of thine arm for our salvation. So 
in the refrain — " cause thy face to shine." 



PSALM LXXX. 



337 



2. Before Ephraim and Benjamin and Manasseh stir up 
thy strength, and come and save us. 

11 Before Ephraim," etc., i. e., moving in advance of Ephraim, Ben- 
jamin, and Manasseh as of old when the twelve tribes were mar- 
shaled for their onward march or for their encamping rest in the 
wilderness. It should be noticed that by divine arrangement for 
locating the tribes in the wilderness, they were formed into a hol- 
low square, three in front of the sacred tent, three on each flank, 
and three in the rear. (Num. 2: 18-24). The latter were pre- 
cisely Ephraim, Benjamin, and Manasseh, so that pertinently, in 
motion or at rest, the symbols of God's visible presence were in 
front of these three tribes — before Ephraim, Benjamin, and Ma- 
nasseh stood the emblem of Jehovah's strength and glory. The 
prayer of this verse therefore reminds Jehovah of his local as well 
as spiritual relation to these tribes during the forty years of their 

wilderness life. "Stir up thy strength" — as if it had been in 

repose or asleep — a conception not uncommon. Interpose for our 
salvation in this sad emergency. 

3. Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine ; 
and we shall be saved. 

" Turn us again ;" cause us to return truly to thee — words which 
might refer to a political or to a spiritual restoration. The polit- 
ical and the spiritual were so closely associated under that economy 
that it seems most natural to suppose them both included. That the 
ten tribes might be politically restored and the whole united na- 
tion brought back spiritually to God may be regarded as the 

burden of this precious refrain. "Let the face of our God shine 

upon us " in his blended light and love, with mercies suited to all 
our case. So shall we be saved. 

4. O Lord God of hosts, how long wilt thou be angry 
against the prayer of thy people ? 

The verb, " be angry," means properly, to smoke, since the prayers 
of God's people under the old economy were often thought of as 
incense ascending before God. Dr. Alexander suggests that the 
smoke of the Lord's anger and the incense of his people's prayers 
" are presented in a kind of conflict." See the usage respecting 
incense in Ps. 141 : 2. The symbol comes perhaps from Lev. 16 : 13. 
The prayer here is : How long shall it seem to us that thy dis- 
pleasure against the sins of our nation shuts off the prayers of 
thy people in her behalf? 

5. Thou feedest them with the bread of tears ; and givest 
them tears to drink in great measure. 

Strong words are these — that thou givest thy people their own 
tears for bread, and tears also for their drinking water and that in 
large measure. Will not the God of love take these tears away 
and feed us with far other bread and water than such as this? 



338 



PSALM LXXX. 



6. Thou makest us a strife unto our neighbours : and our 
enemies laugh among themselves. 

"A strife unto our neighbors," but probably not in the sense of 
a bone of contention as betweeen themselves, but rather an object 
of contempt and scorn to them. They insult us for our weakness 
and glory over our national calamity. Edom and Ammon . missed 
no opportunity of exulting over the decline or fall of Israel. See 
Ps. 137: 7, and Amos 1: 11, and Obad. 12. 

7. Turn us again, O God of hosts, and cause thy face to 
shine; and we shall be saved. 

Instead of simply " God" as in v. 3, we have in the form of ad- 
dress here, "God of Hosts," significant of his ample power to 
save. 

8. Thou hast brought a vine out of Egypt : thou hast 
cast out the heathen and planted it. 

9. Thou preparedst room before it, and didst cause it to 
take deep root, and it filled the land. 

"We have here (v. 8-16) a beautiful parable, or shall we call ifc 
an allegory, admirably sustained throughout, in which Israel 
brought forth from Egypt, is a vine transplanted from that soil to 
Canaan, and there under divine culture for a long time prosper- 
ous, but at this present writing, sadly desolate. Part of the 
beauty of the parable consists in the apt choice of the Hebrew 
words — e.g. , the verb "hast brought," i. e., a vine, might suggest 
the transplanting of a vine, or somewhat more readily, the mov- 
ing of a nomadic caravan across a desert with allusion to Israel 
on his way to Canaan. "Thou didst root out the heathen," pulling 
them out by the roots to make room for this vine in Canaan. 
Thus room was made all round about for its luxuriant growth till 
Israel (under David and Solomon) had finally possessed all the 
land promised to their fathers. 

10. The hills were covered with the shadow of it, and 
the boughs thereof were like the goodly cedars. 

11. She sent out her boughs unto the sea, and her branches 
unto the river. 

One great vine (this is the conception) covered the hills of Pales- 
tine with its shadow; its towering boughs were tall like the cedars 
of God [Hebrew] ; her branches stretched out to the great sea on 
the West and to the great river (Euphrates) on the East. These 
were the natural boundaries of the land promised originally to the 
patriarchs. CSee Gen. 15: 18, and Ex. 23: 31, and Num. 34: 6, 
and Deut. 11: 24.) 

12. Why hast thou then broken down her hedges, so that 
all they which pass by the way do pluck her ? 



PSALM LXXX. 



339 



13. The boar of the wood doth waste it, and the wild 
beast of the field doth devour it. 

"The hedges," built for her protection against destructive ani- 
mals. " Why hast thou broken down " — by thy providential agen- 
cies permitting this result and therefore in a sense conceived to 
have done it. The point of the plea is — Why shouldst thou destroy 
thine own vine after so much labor and love spent upon it and after 
it had become so magnificently grand ? Look down and see how 
the boar of the wood — the wild boar — doth waste it, etc. The 
great Assyrian power had ravaged the whole Northern kingdom, 
besieged and captured Samaria and taken the mass of the people 
away into captivity. The ten tribes were politically ruined. So 
large a portion of the original vine had been wasted, devoured. 

14. Return, we beseech thee, O God of hosts : look down 
from heaven, and behold, and visit this vine ; 

15. And the vineyard which thy right hand hath planted, 
and the branch that thou madest strong for thyself. 

16. It is burned with fire, it is cut down : they perish at 
the rebuke of thy countenance. 

"Keturn" — for the thought is that God must have been absent 
and lias not noticed this ruin befalling his vine. This calling the 
attention of God to his wasted vine — his broken down and deso- 
lated people — is full of the simplicity of nature. In v. 15 " and 

the vineyard," etc., gives the general sense undoubtedly, yet critics 
differ much on the question whether the first word * of the verse 
is a verb in the imperative in the sense— protect, sustain ; or a noun 
in the sense — thy layer-plant, shoot. We may read, either : Sustain 
what thy right hand has planted ; or continuing the construction 
with the verb next preceding: Visit this vine, this layer-plant which 
thine own hand has planted. The word occurs but rarely ; usage 
fails to furnish decisive authority. Either construction is admis- 
sible.— — "And the branch" — which, however, in Hebrew is the 
word for son: look upon the son. This drops the allegory and 
returns to the real thing — Israel, the chosen son of God. "Is 

Ephraim my dear son (Jer. 31 : 20) ? " Madest strong " — hast 

reared up to manhood, cultivated and nourished unto maturity and 
strength. "Burnt with fire;" "cut down" — resume the alle- 
gorical conception of a vine; while the last clause, " they perish," 
etc., applies naturally to the people. — —"At the rebuke of thy 
countenance/' as if the frown of his face was their ruin — only one 
look of displeasure, and they perished before him. 

17. Let thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand, 
upon the son of man whom thou madest strong for thyself. 

The choice of words here is governed by v. 15. Thy right hand 



340 



PSALM LXXX. 



hath planted a noble vine, i. e., hath begotten and nourished a son. 
Now let thy hand return and be again upon this man of thy right 
hand, this son of man whom thou hast matured into manhood and 
strength for thyself "Whether there is here a tacit allusion to the 
word Benjamin, which signifies the son of the right hand, it may be 

impossible to decide with certainty. "We have a phrase kindred 

in thought to this — " my right-hand man" — my chosen helper, my 
chief reliance. So God trained Israel for his chief spiritual work 
in this world. 

18. So will not we go back from thee : quicken us, and 
we will call upon thy name. 

19. Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts, cause thy face 
to shine ; and we shall be saved. 

Thy right hand being once more upon us in mercy and in power, 
we will no more apostatize from thee. Give us life from the dead ; 
put new life, even thine own life, into us, and we will call upon thy 
name. The closing refrain adds the word Lord, i, e., Jehovah, to 
the form as in v. 7, heightening the strength and endearment of the 
sacred name by this addition — our covenant-keeping God, the 

changeless and ever faithful One. Recurring to the history we 

note that in the first year of Hezekiah a very special effort was made 
to invite all the seriously disposed people of the ten tribes to meet 
with their brethren of Judah at Jerusalem in the celebration of the 
Passover. (2 Chron. 30). The messengers of Hezekiah with his 
royal invitation were by some laughed to scorn ; " Nevertheless 
divers of Asher and Manasseh, and of Zebulun humbled themselves 
and came to Jerusalem " (v. 11). "A multitude of the people even 
many of Ephraim and Manasseh, Issachar and Zebulun," are 
referred to again as being present (v. 18). This, be it noted, was 
in Hezekiah's first year. Three years later the Assyrian King 
had swept the whole country of the ten tribes with his conquering 
army and had laid siege to the forlorn hope of their nation in their 
capital, Samaria. After a siege of three years, t. e., in Hezekiah's 
sixth year, the city fell and the nation was ruined. Was not this 
a most startling, thrilling event to the Southern kingdom ? It was 
not only full of suggestions of danger to themselves from the same 
great conquering power; it was also suggestive of sorrow and 
sympathy with their afflicted brethren, and not least, of sadness 
over the great breach made in the once united and flourishing 
kingdom of Israel. This t; vine " which had such a history as our 
Psalm suggests, this great people of the living God — how are they 
smitten and wasted! Shall not some notice of this sad event be 
taken in Judah by the worshiping assembly in Jerusalem? 
Nothing could be more appropriate. Hence this Psalm, to be 
sung by the thousands of Judah in solemn remembrance of the 
desolation brought on so large a portion of their once united, pros- 
perous, and happy kingdom. 



PSALM LXXXI. 



341 



PSALM LXXXI. 

The words, " To the chief musician upon Gittith," occur also 

in the caption of Ps. 8, but not elsewhere. See notes there. 

On the points of date and suggestive occasion, I see no objection 
to locating it very nearly with Ps. 80, perhaps shortly before the 
final destruction of the Northern kingdom, yet in full view of its 
near approach. Its appeal may have been designed both for the 
few open ears yet remaining in that kingdom, and for the people 
of Judah. It is a summons to the worship of the true God, on the 
great festivals (v. 1-4) because of his blessings upon the nation 
in its Egyptian and wilderness life (vs. 5-7) ; exhorting against all 
idolatry (vs. 8-10), yet plainly implying that the people had already 
become obdurately hardened and perverse (vs. 11, 12), to the grief 
of their divine Father (v. 13) and to their imminent peril; from 
which however God would soon redeem them if they would peni- 
tently seek and honestly serve him (vs. 14-16). 

1. Sing aloud unto God our strength: make a joyful 
noise unto the God of Jacob. 

"Unto God our strength" has special force on the supposition 
that powerful armies had been threatening or perhaps were even 
then ravaging the ancient land of Israel. It was faith in Israel's 
lofty triumph which amid such surroundings summoned the people 
to sing aloud with joyful songs and shoutings to their God. It 
amounted to saying : Whom need we fear with the infinite God on 
our side ? What are all the hosts of Hazael or of Shalmanezer, 
matched against our Lord God Almighty? So may God's people 
say in every like emergency : What can the utmost powers of hell 
avail to harm me, if only my own Jesus is near ? 

2. Take a psalm, and bring hither the timbrel, the 
pleasant harp with the psaltery. 

3. Blow up the trumpet in the new moon, in the time 
appointed, on our solemn feast day. 

4. For this ivas a statute for Israel, and a law of the 
God of Jacob. 

"Take a Psalm," i e., take up a song; select a Psalm of praise 
to sing, and then take appropriate instruments to accompany the 

voice in song. "Blow up" means only, Give the full blast; let 

the trumpet ring out its shrill and thrilling tones, calling the 
people to the service of worship on the new moon. See Num. 
23 : 24, which " on the seventh month and first day of the month 
enjoins a sabbath, a memorial of blowing of trumpets, a holy con- 
vocation," etc. The Hebrew word for "time appointed,"* is 

applied by some to the festival on the new moon ; by others to that 
on the full moon. Moreover, some suppose this verse alludes to the 



342 



PSALM LXXXI. 



Passover exclusively ; while others with more reason give promi- 
nence to the festivals of the seventh month in which occurred the 
great feast of the new moon; the great day of atonement on the 
tenth ; and the feast of tabernacles, joyful above all, on the four- 
teenth. We need not exclude any of the Mosaic festivals. The 
comprehensive thought is, Come and worship Israel's God with 
cheerful trust and joyous triumph, in all the ways and times of 
his appointment. Praise him exultingly though in the very face 
of tierce and mighty national foes, for what are they before our 
own great God ? 

5. This lie ordained in Joseph for a testimony, when he 
went out through the land of Egypt : where I heard a lan- 
guage that I understood not. 

6. I removed his shoulder from the burden: his hands 
were delivered from the pots. 

The first clause somewhat favors the reference of what is said 
above of "our feast day" to the Passover specifically, since that 
was ordained precisely at the point of their history where they 

went forth from Egypt (Ex. 12). The language used here for 

the Exodus is somewhat peculiar: "in his going forth upon* or 

over the land of Egypt as if with the march of a conqueror." 

In the clause, " I heard a language I understood not," we must 
choose between the following constructions: (1) I, the Lord 
[and my people also] heard the foreign, unknown tongue of the 
Egyptians ; (2) I, the Lord, heard such words of murmuring 
from my people as were strange, unaccountable; or (3) I, the 
people, heard the voice of God from Sinai, as never before. Of 
these the first named is much to be preferred, this being a cus- 
tomary phrase to express a very undesirable condition, in a strange 
land (Deut 28 : 49, and Jer. 5 : 15, etc.). The sudden change of 
person as from "he" to "I" occurs very often in Hebrew. The 
person speaking throughout the remaining part of the Psalm is 

the Lord. (See vs. 6, 7, 8, 10, etc). V. 6 * refers to the relief 

which God gave to the enslaved, hard-tasked people in Egypt. 
" I removed his shoulder from under the heavy burden ; his hands 
passed out from under the basket," in which they bore brick and 
mortar for building. " This kind of vessel has been found de- 
lineated in a burial ground at Thebes." (Alexander). 

7. Thou calledst in trouble, and I delivered thee ; I an- 
swered thee in the secret place of thunder : I proved thee 
at the waters of Meribah. Selah. 

"Thou calledst in trouble," i. e., as said Ex. 3: 7-10. The 
people, crushed by their hard bondage, cried to God for help, and 

he heard their cry. The Hebrew verbs, I answered thee, I 

proved thee, are in the future tense, the precise idea being this : 



PSALM LXXXI. 



343 



[I said] I will answer thee from the dark thunder-cloud on Sinai ; 
I will prove thee at the waters of Meribah. The words express 
the prospective purpose of God in respect to the moral discipline 
of the people at the point where he took up their case under their 
task-masters in Egypt. 

8. Hear, 0 my people, and I will testify unto thee : O 
Israel, if thou wilt hearken unto me ; 

9. There shall no strange god be in thee ; neither shalt 
thou worship any strange god. 

This is an admonition to present duty based on the review of the 

ancient past It is better to make a full pause at the end of 

v. 8, the sense being, I will testify unto thee, O Israel, if thou wilt 
hearken to me : and not — " If thou wilt hearken, there shall be no 

strange god," etc. How gladly, saith their God, would I testify 

my love to thee, presenting my appeals and claims, if only thou 

wilt hearken. " Strange god " — any god other than their own, a 

heathen, false god. It was their crying, damning sin that they 
would accept the gods and the worship of tbe heathen nations 
round about — Phenicia and Syria. 

10. I am the Lord thy God, which brought thee out of 
the land of Egypt : open thy mouth wide, and I will fill it. 

In delivering them from Egypt Jehovah had proved himself to 
be truly their own God. Let them henceforth believe his promises, 
obey his word, and in all things accept him as their Infinite God. 

Xo words can be more plain than these last: " Open thy 

mouth wide; I will fill it," but their beauty and pertinence are 
better seen if we suppose the writer thinks of the little nestlings, 
late from the egg — eyes still closed, but ears quick to notice any 
one's approach and sure to open wide their mouth for the food 
their instincts look for from "the mother bird. Sweet confiding 
creatures, they have but one thought—that their good mother will 
surely give them what they need. So let God's children do, for 
they are almost as powerless to distinguish good from evil as the 
eyeless nestlings, and have quite as much reason as they to accept 
all that God drops into their open mouths as being the best things 
possible in their case. Moreover let them enlarge their heart and 
make broad their requests, remembering that when God's children 
ask favors of him, they are never straitened in God, but only in 
themselves. 

11. But my people would not hearken to my voice; and 
Israel would none of me. 

" Would none of me " is scarcely modern English. The Hebrew 
means : Would not obey me ; were not willing as toward me. They 
were simply perverse, rebellious. — —Historically, this had a fear- 
fully wide application. It was true of the masses that came out of 



344 



PSALM LXXXI. 



Egypt ; it became painfully apparent during the time of the Judges, 
and in the age after the revolt under Jeroboam. 

12. So I gave them up unto their own hearts' lust : arid 
they walked in their own counsels. 

"So," in the sense of consequently , i. e., because of their perverse- 
ness, I sent them forth from me ; I thrust them away for the per- 
verseness of their heart. The centuries of long forbearance came 
to an end at last, and God gave up first the Northern kingdom 
and then at last the Southern also to captivity and desolation. 
They would not have Jehovah for their God, but would have Baal 
and Moloch ; so God gave them up to their own perverseness, and 
consequently, to national ruin. This is the law of his moral king- 
dom with individual sinners no less than with nations. There is 
a point beyond which forbearance can go no farther, and where 
forbearance ends, judgment without mercy begins. 

13. Oh that my people had hearkened unto me, and 
Israel had walked in my ways ! 

14. I should soon have subdued their enemies, and turned 
my hand against their adversaries. 

But such a doom brings bitter grief to the parental heart of the 
Great Father. Most tenderly, most honestly and truly, he cries 
out: O that my people had hearkened to me! How soon should I 
have subdued their enemies and turned back my strong hand from 

afflicting them ! So God will say with equal truth over the doom 

of every lost sinner : 0 that he had heard my call to repent ! O 
that he had heeded my invitations of mercy and free pardon ! 0 
that there had been the heart in him to obey my voice ! 

15. The haters of the Lord should have submitted 
themselves unto him: but their time should have endured 
forever. 

16. He should have fed them also with the finest of the 
wheat ; and with honey out of the rock should I have satis- 
fied thee. 

"Submitted themselves" — so impressed with fear as even to 
make false professions of allegiance — the verb used being common 
in Hebrew to express the thought of submission through extreme 
fear. The case of the Gibeonites and Joshua was perhaps the 

occasion of the phrase. "Their time" — the time of my people's 

prosperity would in this case have been unlimited. Age after age 
they might have lived in the sunlight of Jehovah's presence and 
love. All earthly good should have filled their cup — the best of 
wheat; fullness of honey. Who can measure the blessings which 
God pours out upon the truly obedient? To nations or to indi- 
viduals, with no exception, these promises are forever good. 



PSALM LXXXII. 



345 



PSALM LXXII. 

This Psalm rebukes corrupt judges, putting in strong light tlieir 
high responsibility as vicegerents of God and therefore held ac- 
countable before him for the faithful administration of justice. 
True to the nature of the case, this Psalm assumes that laws and 
tribunals exist for the benefit of those who need them for the pro- 
tection of their rights, i. e., for the poor, the helpless, the friendless. 
Let all judges, and indeed legislators also, know and forget it not, 
that God's sympathies are with these dependent classes, and he will 
surely hold civil officers to their responsibilities toward these needy 
ones. If they take the place of God, either in making or in admin- 
istering civil law, let them take care that they use their high 
powers in sympathy with their Supreme Master and never in 
defiance of his throne. 

As to the date and occasion of this Psalm, nothing can be cer- 
tainly known. Xo doubt it was written with a definite aim, 
addressing certain corrupt judges then in office and then abusing 

their powers. " How long will ye judge unjustly? " The place 

of this Psalm in the collection slightly favors its reference to the 
same age with the two preceding Psalms, i. e., in the latter days 
of the Northern kingdom, Such apostasy from God as theirs, 
naturally carried with it corruption of the courts of justice and 
crying oppression of the poor — to all which, history lends its 
ample confirmation. Amos, living among that people at that time, 
witnesseth thus: i; They oppress the poor and crush the needy; 
turn judgment to wormwood and leave off righteousness in the 
earth; hate him that rebuketh in the gate" [the court-room]; 
"turn aside the poor in the gate from his right" etc. To such 
perversions of justice, the rebukes of this Psalm most pertinently 
apply. 

1. God standeth in the congregation of the mighty ; he 
judgetli among the gods. 

In the use of the word "gods" (vs. 1, 6) the English reader is 
liable to be misled by the defective translation of these passages 
compared with certain passages in the Mosaic law which speak 
of human judges under the same name. The facts are that in Ex. 
21: 6, and 22: 8, 9, 28, this same word (" Elohini ") is used of 
civil judges and is translated "judges." But the same word is 
used here and beyond all question in the same sense. It should 
therefore have been translated "judges" here as well as there; or 
gods there as well as here. A uniform translation where the 
sense is so obviously the same would have relieved the difficulty. 

If the question be asked, How it came to pass that the word 

"Elohim" was given to mere men in the capacity of judges? the 
answer is: (1) They were acting in the place of God, in behalf of 
God — were quasi-gods in the administration of justice in God's be- 



346 



PSALM LXXX1L 



half. Here we may note how strongly this idea was put and 
pressed under the ancient economy. " Ye shall not respect per- 
sons in judgment; ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye 
shall not be afraid of' the face of man, for the judgment is God's " 
(Deut. 1: 17). Jehoshaphat said to judges appointed by him : 
"Take heed what ye do, for ye judge, not for man but for the 

Lord who is with you in the judgment" (2 Chron. 19: 6). 

(2) This name for God admits of a wider range of application than 
any one of 5 his other names, it being applied to angels (Ps. 8 : G) 
as well as here to judges. In the singular number (El), it is used 
of the gods of the heathen (Isa. 44: 10, 15, and 45: 20, and 46: 
6). "Standeth in the congregation" — here said of the assem- 
blies convened for judicial purposes equivalent to the civil court. 
God takes his stand evermore in the midst of those who gather for 

the administration of law, always present in the court-room. 

" Congregation of the mighty; " not the assemblies of great men or 
strong men; not implying that God is among them because they 
are mighty men ; but the word being " El " [God] we must apply 
it to him unless there are very strong reasons for some other sense 
of the word. The meaning of the clause therefore I take to be : 
God standeth in the judicial assemblies which himself — the Most 
Mighty One, has established. "Why should he not be there to 
supervise all its proceedings; to hold every judge to his high re- 
sponsibilities ? 

2. How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the per- 
sons of the wicked ? Selah. 

To "accept the person of the wicked " is commonly supposed to 
mean : to have regard to other things — points of a personal nature — 
rather than to the intrinsic right of the case. Some critics how- 
ever give it this turn : To take into favor wicked men — men whose 
crimes you ought to condemn, and who ought to be themselves 
condemned because of their crimes. The general sense throughout 
the Bible seems to be, to make discriminations on the ground, not 
of intrinsic character and merit, but of extraneous and personal 
considerations; e. g., the prestige of riches, the offer of bribes, 
etc. 

3. Defend the poor and fatherless : do justice to the af- 
flicted and needy. 

4. Deliver the poor and needy : rid them out of the hand 
of the wicked. 

Kemarkably this passage is made strong by a grouping of all 
that class of words known to the language — the weak, the unpro- 
tected, the fatherless, the pennyless, etc. 

5. They know not, neither will they understand ; they 
walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are 
out of course. 



PSALM LXXXIII. 



347 



The judges who rule iniquitously seem to have no sense, not 
even common understanding. Mark how strangely they ignore the 

God above and their own high responsibilities to his bar ! Such 

administration of law subverts the very foundations of all society, 
even as if in the material world, the very foundations were all 
afloat, sliding out from beneath our feet! This is the thought in- 
dicated in the Hebrew verb. 

6. I have said, Ye arc Gods; and all of you are 
children of the Most High. 

7. But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the 
princes. 

Though I have called you "gods" and children of the Most 
High, yet be not elated ; do not dream of being immortal for this 
earth, or of being above responsibility to the Most High ; for ye 
shall surely die like frail man, made of the ground.* And that 
death will bring you before the dreadful bar of Him whose law 
you have trampled down ; whose heart of love for the poor you 
have outraged ; whose hottest retribution you have brought down 
on your own guilty heads ! 

8. Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit 
all nations. 

"Arise," for the case is urgent; the perversions of justice are 
awful; arise, therefore, and judge all the earth — not the land of 
Canaan only, but all the nations of the wide earth; "for thou 
shalt inherit all the nations" even as thou hast long since called 
Israel thine "inheritance." This assumes the broad doctrine that 
Israel's God is Supreme Judge of all the nations of men, Gentiles 

no less than Jews. Consider Ps. 2 : 8. The moral lessons of 

this Psalm for all who have to do with the administration of civil 
law are too obvious to need remark. Who does not see that if 
there be a Supreme Being, the doctrine of this Psalm must be 
true, ana" being true, is infinitely beneficent in its influence and 
sublime in its moral grandeur? 

PSALM LXXXIII. 

This Psalm supposes a general combination of adjacent powers 
against Israel : Edom, Moab, Ammon, Philistia, Tyre, and Syria, 
with the full purpose of blotting out the very name of Israel for- 
ever. In such an emergency what should the people of the Lord 
do but what is indicated here — cry aloud to their own Almighty 
God for help ? Such is the strain of this Psalm, a song composed 
to be sung for this occasion, to embody the prayers of the whole 



348 



PSALM LXXXIII. 



people. As to the precise historic occasion, the evidence pre- 
ponderates strongly in favor of the great combination of foreign 
powers against Judah in the reign of Jehoshaphat, of which we 
have an account in 2 Chron. 20, and to which date Ps. 47 and 48 
also belong. The account in Chronicles should be read in con- 
nection with this Psalm. The scene was intensely thrilling — the 
invasion so formidable, its animus so malign, its prospects of suc- 
cess so fair, and the consequent ruin of the Jewish city and nation 
so apparently near and certain ; but in the end the A.1 mighty arm 
was interposed; the salvation of Israel was glorious, and the ruin 
of their enemies most disgraceful and overwhelming. It was 
prayer answered before all earth and heaven, and the arm of Al- 
mighty God made bare to the confounding of his enemies and the 

exulting joy of his friends. The writer in Smith's Bible 

Dictionary ["Psalms"] holds that this Psalm refers to a supposed 
combination of foreign enemies against both Judah and Israel in 
the times of Jeroboam second of Israel and Uzziah of Judah — an 
hypothesis which lacks historic support and goes against all prob- 
ability in supposing that Jeroboam second came into such relations 
to the God of Israel, and if he did, that his history should ignore 
it. 

1. Keep not thou silence, O God: hold not thy peace, 
and be not still, O God. 

Surely it was no time for their God to be silent and at rest when 
such dangers threatened his people. 

2. For, lo, thine enemies make a tumult : and they that 
hate thee have lifted up the head. 

3. They have taken crafty counsel against thy people, 
and consulted against thy hidden ones. 

" Thine enemies," not merely ours. They are mustering their 

forces against thee, O God. "Make a tumult," the Hebrew word 

implying a confused rumble and roar as of distant armies, mus- 
tering for battle. "Against thy hidden ones," those who are 

under thy special protection, shielded beneath thine outspread 
wing. 

4. They have said, Come, and let us cut them off from 
being a nation ; that the name of Israel may be no more in 
remembrance. 

To exterminate the Israel they hated and put an end forever to 
the annoyance they felt from her presence among them; to wipe 
out the old score of many a grudge and bury her very name so 
deep that it should never rise again — such was the fell purpose of 
their heart. The prayer of God's people brings up these points 
as conclusive reasons why God should arise in his might to blast 
their schemes. 



PSALM LXXXIII. 



349 



5. For they have consulted together with one consent : 
they are confederate against thee : 

6. The tabernacles of Edom, and the Ishmaelites ; of 
Moab, and the Hagarenes ; 

7. Gebal, and Ammon, and Amalek ; the Philistines with 
the inhabitants of Tyre ; 

8. Assur also is joined with them : they have holpen the 
children of Lot. Selah. 

" The tabernacles [or tents] of Edom," for the people dwelling 
therein — a tent-abiding race. The Ishmaelites, their neighbors of 
the Arabian desert. The Hagarenes appear in history (1 Chron. 
5: 10) as dwellers in eastern Arabia, contiguous to the tribe of 
lleuben on the east of Jordan. "Gebal," properly a mountain; 
here for the mountainous district south of the Dead Sea, and em- 
braced in the territory of Edom. The Philistines on the south- 
west and Tyre on the north-west with Syria on the north, com- 
pleted the circle, engirding the little kingdom of Judah on every 

side. -"They have helped the children of Lot," i. e. } Moab and 

Ammon who seem to have been the prime instigators of this con- 
spiracy against Judah. "Selah;" pause to think of these 

powerful foes and of the threatened ruin impending over God's 
covenant people. 

9. Do unto them as unto the Midianites ; as to Sisera, 
as to Jabin, at the brook of Kison : 

10. Wliich perished at En-dor : they became as dung for 
the earth. 

Here is the prayer. The historic allusions to previous victories 
over these or similar enemies had in themselves an inspiration of 
hope. Why shouldest not thou, O God, re-enact those ancient de- 
liverances of thy people and again overwhelm thy foes in judg- 
ment ? As unto the Midianites by the hand of Gideon ( Judg. 7) ; 

as to Sisera and Jabin (Judg. 4 and 5). 

11. Make their nobles like Oreb, and like Zeeb : yea, all 
their princes as Zebah, and as Zalmunna : 

12. Who said, Let us take to ourselves the houses of 
God in possession. 

"Oreb and Zeeb," "Zebah and Zalmunna," suggest Gideon's 
victory over the Midianites, as given Judg. 7 and 8 — one of the 
most striking manifestations of .Jehovah's power against the ene- 
mies of Israel. Those ancient Midianites, like these of the age 
of our Psalm, meant no less than to drive us from our homes and 
take possession for themselves. "Houses of God," but the He- 
brew* has the broader sense of dwelling-places, including not 
only the tent or house proper, but the adjacent grounds. 



350 



PSALM LXXXIV. 



13. O my God, make them like a wheel ; as the stubble 
before the wind. 

" Like a wheel," properly, a rolling thing, with reference here 
to flying chaff driven by the high winds, of which that people 
availed themselves on the hill-tops for winnowing grain. Isaiah 
makes use beautifully of the same word in a similar connection 
(Isa. 17: 13) : "like a rolling thing before the whirlwind." 

14. As the fire burnetii a wood, and as the flame setteth 
the mountains on fire ; 

15. So persecute them with thy tempest, and make them 
afraid with thy storm. 

The fires in a dry forest or sweeping up the mountain sides are 
vivid images of the destruction here invoked upon these ^combined 
enemies of God's people. So do thou chase them down with thy 
tempest ; strike terror through them with thy storm ! 

16. Fill their faces with shame ; that they may seek thy 
name, O Lord. 

17. Let them be confounded and troubled forever ; yea, 
let them be put to shame, and perish : 

18. That men may know that thou,* whose name alone is 
JEHOVAH, art the Most High over all the earth. 

As shame reveals itself in the blush on the face, no expression 
can be stronger than this : " Fill their faces with shame." And 
let it be forever ; through all time ; let them never recover from 
this disgraceful defeat, this crushing overthrow. The animus of 
this prayer is that men — other men — all the world outside of these 
combined nations, and perhaps all the survivors of these — may 
seek thy name, O Lord, and may know of a truth that thou art 
the Most High God over all the earth. Special beauty and forco 
appear in the closing strain : Thou who alone bearest the name 
Jekovah — the ever-living, unchanging, ever-faithful God of thy 
covenant people. Who is like unto thee ? Let all the nations of 
the earth know how worthy thou art to be trusted, loved, adored, 
by all thy people. 

PSALM LXXXIV. 

For the words, "upon Gittith," see Notes introductory to Ps. 

8. The Psalms ascribed to Asaph and his family closed with 

Ps. 83 ; this is ascribed to another family in the same profession — 

that of Korah. On the question of date and special occasion, 

opinions are divided between the times of David driven into exile 
by Absalom's rebellion, and the times of Hezekiah — in the latter 
case expressing the spirit of the king and his pious friends when 
they reinstated the national festivals and warmly invited their 



PSALM LXXXIV. 



351 



brethren of the Northern kingdom to come up to the holy city and 
temple on the great Passover. (See 2 Chron. 29: 3). In favor 
of the former it is urged that this Psalm affiliates with Ps. 42. 
But in fact it has more points unlike Ps. 42 than like it. It is 
with that Psalm in its common love and longing for the sanctuary, 
but it does not like that, assume the writer's absence and exile far 
away across the Jordan, and it breathes none of his intense 
despondency, but is rather hopeful and strong in the spirit of a 
vigorous faith in God. The whole tone of this Psalm is that of 
inviting men to the tabernacle of the Lord. It contemplates their 
journeying thither, but sees no toils, no discomforts, but only 
sweet associations and fountains of delight in the very travels up 
from distant cities to the place of appearing before God in Zion. i 
These points accord well with the spirit and circumstances of 
Hezekiah's great reformation. Coupling them with the place 
which the compilers have assigned to this Psalm, viz., in the third 
book, along with those which fall between the revolt and the cap- 
tivity, the evidence seems to me to preponderate very strongly in 
favor of the times of Hezekiah. 

1. How amiable are thy tabernacles, O Lord of hosts ! 

2. My soul longeth, yea, even fainteth for the courts of 
the Lord : my heart and my flesh crieth out for the living 



"How amiable" — words which legitimately mean: how worthy 
of being loved, how lovable in general ; but the Hebrew is more 
definite and personal : How dear to my heart— O how tenderly do I 
love the place where Thou dwellest, O Lord of Hosts ! It is 
rather an utterance of the heart than a judgment of the intelli- 
gence, expressing what one feels for himself rather than what he 

holds as a general, abstract truth. "Longing," "fainting," are 

strong expressions of intense, languishing desire — a feeling that 

nothing else can at all satisfy. The Hebrew verb for crieth 

out * is used almost if not quite invariably for the shoutings of 
exultant joy ; not for the imploring cry for help. The distinction 
is important as bearing upon the tone of feeling that pervades the 
Psalm. 

3. Yea, the sparrow hath found a house, and the swallow 
a nest for herself, where she may lay her young, even thine 
altars, O Lord of hosts, my King, and my God. 

In its obvious sense this speaks of literal birds as finding place 
for their nests near the altars of the Lord (near is probably the 
meaning of the Hebrew word here). Some critics, thinking this 
highly improbable, would escape the difficulty by assuming that 
the Psalmist compares himself to those little birds — " Yea, even I, 
a wandering bird, have at last found a resting place for myself 



God. 




352 



PSALM LXXXIV 



and my dear ones in thine house," etc. But this seems to he an 
unnatural sense for these words. On the other hand those little 
birds, certainly in this country and doubtless in Palestine of old, 
are wont to make their nests in the quiet dwelling places of men, 
and especially in those which are temporarily unoccupied or 
deserted. It should be borne in mind that Ahaz, immediately 
preceding Hezekiah, had " cut in pieces the vessels of the house 
of God and shut up the doors of the house of the Lord" (2 Chron. 
28 : 24). Consequently Hezekiah " in the first year of his reign, 
in the first month, opened the doors of the house of the Lord and 
repaired them " (2 Chron. 29 : 3). Public worship there had been 
for some time entirely discontinued : they " had shut up the doors 
i of the porch, put out the lamps, and had not burned incense nor 
offered burnt-offering in the holy place unto the God of Israel " 
(v. 7). For a period therefore during the reign of that most wicked 
Ahaz, the sparrow and the swallow and they only had found sweet 
homes for themselves and their young around the altars -of the 
Lord of Hosts. Yet there was the appropriate home for those who 
could say of this glorious Lord of Hosts — " my King is he and my 
God." J 

4. Blessed are they that dwell in thy house: they will 
be still praising thee. Selah. 

Happy are the little birds and birdlings who nestle there ; more 
blessed still are those whom God has made in his own image and 
who intelligently give their hearts' best love and homage to their 
Maker. The reason is given; viz., they will perpetually praise 
thee ; round and round ; over and over again, evermore will they 
pour forth their praises from full glad hearts to the glorious One, 
their Maker and Father. The Hebrew word rendered "still" 
[" still praising "] gives precisely this sense: they will reiterate 

their praises in perpetual succession. "Selah;" pause and 

consider their joy! "Dwell in thy house" indicates that they 

are often there and so to speak, at home there in the love of their 
heart and in the quiet trust of their souls in the Great God who 
makes it his abode. 

5. Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee ; in whose 
heart are the ways of them. 

"Whose strength is in thee" — not in himself but in his God 
alone ; who looks to thee for help at all times, not only in great 
but in all lesser and all least emergencies. The Gospel writers 
speak of the same living trust: " I can do all things through Christ 
who strengthened me " (Phil. 4: 13). " I am the vine ; ye are the 
branches ; abide in me as the branch in the vine : so shall ye be 
living branches and not dead, and bear much fruit to the glory 

of God (John 15 : 4-7). Such are indeed truly blessed. The last 

verse is concise and difficult. All that appears in the original 
reads thus : " Ways— in their heart." The Italic words " of them " 



PSALM LXXXIV. 353 

are without authority and, in this connection, without meaning. 
The word for "ways" signifies a high-way, rolled up, cast up; is 
used by Isaiah and translated "high-way" in 11: 16, and 33: 8, 
and 40 : 3, and 49 : 11, and 62: 10. It may refer therefore to the 
usual routes of travel from remote parts of Palestine up to Jerusa- 
lem, or possibly, as some suppose, to the procession of people on 
their march to attend the holy festivals. The passage would then 
mean that such worshipers love these high-ways. Hallowed associa- 
tions cluster round them. Other critics give the passage the 

sense of ways prepared in their heart for the incoming and abode 
of the Lord himself, carrying out the figure of Isaiah (40 : 3) to 
its spiritual thought— " Prepare ye the way of the Lord." But 
the next verse keeps the actual journey still before the mind, at 
least ideally: " Passing through the valley of Baca; " and therefore 
the drift of thought seems to demand a reference in these brief 
words to the high-ways toward Jerusalem in their material sense. 

6. Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a 
well ; the rain also filleth the pools. 

Each of the two clauses of this verse is controverted and must 

perhaps be left a little doubtful. "The valley of Baca" Fuerst 

translates, " Valley of the balsam shrub," which he locates not 
far from Jerusalem, one which many of the pilgrims had to 'pass 
on their way to the holy festivals. Gesenius gives the more 
common view — "The vale of weeping; valley of lamentation," 
taking it as a proper name of "a valley in Palestine, probably 
gloomy and sterile. ' Others assume it to be only ideal, like " the 
valley of the shadow of death," signifying that travelers burdened 
with sorrows who wet their way with tears, yet coming up to the 
temple of the living God find all joys abounding there. They turn 
a vale of tears to a valley of well-springs and verdure. I am con- 
strained to think there is a play upon the significance of the word 
"Baca," weeping, in the manner last above stated; but whether 
a valley of that name was known to the geography of Palestine in 

the age of the writer must remain in doubt. On the last clause 

critics differ widely. The word for "pools " with the vowels of 

our Hebrew text must mean blessings. This being conceded, the 
test-word is the one translated rain* which in nearly or quite 
every other case of its use means teacher, and not rain. Hence 
Alexander with most of the older authorities gives the passage this 
sense : " The teacher is clothed with blessings." Gesenius puts 
it, "The rain" \i. e. y the early rain] "gives abundant blessings." 
But Fuerst starts a new interpretation, making it the proper name 
of some dry and barren valley through which as well as through 
the valley of Baca the pilgrims had to pass on their way to Jeru- 
salem. This valley was clothed with blessings to them.- The 

strong point in support of the sense "teacher," is the well es- 



rrno* 



354 



PSALM LXXXIV. 



tablished usage of the word. This is so general that it could 
scarcely fail to suggest the thought. Under this construction, the 
Psalmist in a measure drops the material figure and gives us the 
spiritual idea, viz., that truth — the things taught and learned of 
God — constitute the real joy and the priceless blessings of the 
Jewish worshiper. 

7. They go from strength to strength, every one of them 
in Zion appeareth before God. 

The thought is that every one who with true heart presents him- 
self before God in Zion, advances from one stage of spiritual 
strength to another. It is a way of soul-progress, analogous to the 
progress made in the journey from one stage to another. 

8. O Lord God of hosts, hear my prayer: give ear, O 
God of Jacob. Selah. 

The temple was the place, its seasons of festival worship, the 
time pre-eminently for prayer. This was their glory. Hence the 
emphasis of the verse before us. The pious worshiper is called 
on to pour out his soul in prayer to the Lord God of Hosts, the 
God of Jacob— this name of the aged patriarch being specially sug- 
gestive of struggling, prevailing prayer. 

9. Behold, O God our shield, and look upon the face of 
thine anointed. 

This does not mean, Look, 0 God, upon our shield ; but rather, 
Do thou, O God, who art our shield, look on the face of thine 
anointed who is at once our king and thy servant. V. 11 shows 
that the Lord God is thought of as both "sun" and "shield," the 

fountain of our light and the arm of our military defense. The 

prayer is that he would regard with merciful favor the King then 
on the throne of David, since the prosperity of the whole people 
hinged upon the divine mercy toward him. The words are 
specially pertinent to be applied under the gospel to Jesus who 
fills the full idea of Israel's king as the medium of all blessings to 
God's people. 

10. For a day in thy courts is better than a thousand. 
I had rather be a door-keeper in the house of my God, than 
to dwell in the tents of wickedness. 

"Better than a thousand," i. e., than a thousand elsewhere. 
"Be a door-keeper," seems to mean precisely, be on the threshold, 
perhaps waiting for admittance, or having only the privilege of 
furtive glances at the glories within ; yet even this I choose before 
dwelling in the tents of wickedness with all their luxuries and 
surroundings. This was a grand sentiment to be sung in those 
times of Hezekiah's revival of the temple worship, to be heralded 
through all the tribes of Israel in the summons which invited them 
to gather in the temple before the God of Zion. 



PSALM LXXXV. 



355 



11. For the Lord God is a sun and shield: the Lord 
-will give grace and glory : no good thing will he withhold 
from them that walk uprightly. 

12. O Loed of hosts, blessed is the man that trusteth 
in thee. 

" San and shield," dispelling all darkness ; supplying all light, 
warmth, fertility, beauty, every thing we need and love that is 
better than eternal frost and endless night. Our " Shield" pro- 
tecting us evermore from all enemies and guarantying our 

perpetual safety. " "Will give grace and glory," grace here and 

glory hereafter; spiritual aid and power against all earthly want 
through all life's struggles ; but the glory of heaven in the eternal 
future. It is every thing to say of him that he will withhold no 
good thing from those who sincerely labor to please him, evermore 
ordering their way uprightly. Must it not be infinitely blessed to 
have such trust in the great God ? 



PSALM LXXXV. 

This Psalm celebrates some signal deliverance wrought by the 
Lord for his people, connected, as in the nature of the case such 
manifestations of God's hand must always have been, with the 
repentance of the people and God's gracious forgiveness of their 
sin. The Psalmist prays for yet other blessings ; that God would 
still avert his displeasure more and more, and reveal his mercy 

in the salvation of his people. Critics locate the historic 

references of the Psalm variously; some [Wordsworth] to the 
restoration of David to the throne after the revolt of Absalom; 
others [Smith] to the revival of religion under Hezekiah ; others 
still to the restoration from Babylon. In support of the latter is 
urged the words of v. 1 — "brought back the captivity of Jacob" — 
also the fitness of the Psalm to the circumstances of that case. 
Two considerations have great weight with me in favor of dating 
the Psalm in the times of Hezekiah: (a) That it puts religious 
reform in the foreground, corresponding fully to the facts in the 
first years of Hezekiah, but less so to the times of David's restora- 
tion from his temporary exile, or to the restoration from Babylon. 

(b) That this theory is in keeping with the date of the Psalms 

that precede it, and therefore accounts for its being placed here by 
the compilers. It is safe to assume that the compilers had far 
more knowledge than we can have as to the author, date, and oc- 
casion of these Psalms; and further, that they usually arranged 
them with a fair measure of regard to their mutual relations to 
each other. 

1. Lord, thou hast been favorable unto thy land : thou 
hast brought back the captivity of Jacob. 



356 



PSALM LXXXV. 



"Favorable," in the sense of propitious, merciful. "Brought 

back the captivity," etc. In its primary and strict sense this must 
mean that God had restored his exiled people to their country. 
But in consequence of the modes of ancient warfare, the driving 
of a people from their home and country, and their restoration 
again were so common that naturally this phrase came to be used 
for other signal blessings, tacitly compared with this. Thus God 
turned again the captivity of Job (42: 10) when he only lifted 
from him that he^vy hand which he had laid upon him and gave 
him back the blessings wrested so remarkably away. Other cases 
of this figurative use of the phrase where no real captivity is 
thought of occur Ezek. 16: 53, and Ps. 14: 7, and 53: 6. Hence 
it can not be inferred from this language that the Psalm refers to 
the actual restoration from Babylon or from any real captivity. 
Some other signal blessing may be thought of. 

2. Thou hast forgiven the iniquity of thy people ; thou 
hast covered all their sin. Selah. 

3. Thou hast taken away all thy wrath : thou hast turned 
thyself from the fierceness of thine anger. 

It will be readily seen that the forgiveness of the nations sins is 
made boldly prominent here, emphasized by "Selah." This fact 
aptly meets the case of the people in the beginning of Hezekiah's 
reign. The preceding reign of Ahaz had introduced gross forms 
of idolatry ; had outraged Jehovah and the public worship at his 
temple, and brought great wrath upon the nation. Hezekiah came 
to the throne with his first thought upon bringing the people back 
penitently to God and propitiating his favor. Nothing could be 
more appropriate therefore than to celebrate God's redeeming mercy 
in the songs of the sanctuary, as here. The reader may profitably 
study the history of Ahaz as given 2 Kings 16, and 2 Chron. 28; 
and the historv of Hezekiah as found 2 Kings 18, and 2 Chron. 
29-32. 

4. Turn us, O God of our salvation, and cause thine 
anger toward us to cease. 

5. Wilt thou be angry with us forever ? wilt thou draw 
out thine anger to all generations? 

6. Wilt thou not revive us again : that thy people may 
rejoice in thee? 

7. Show us thy mercy, O Lord, and grant us thy salva- 
tion. 

As it stands here this is prayer for the nation, yet is entirely 

appropriate for any community or any church. " O God of our 

salvation," thou hast often saved thy people in times past; there- 
fore we confide in thee for blessings now. In v. 6 the Hebrew 

reads, Wilt thou not return and revive us ; come back to us and 
quicken us to new spiritual life. Obviously, " revive " — cause us 



PSALM LXXXV. 



357 



to live again — contemplates spiritual and not chiefly temporal 

blessings. The last clause may be read — "And shall not thy 

people rejoice in thee ?" The connecting word is and rather than 
" that." 

8. I will hear what God the Lord will speak : for he 
will speak peace unto his people, and to his saints : but 
let them not turn again to folly. 

The precise sense of the original is rather — Let me hear; let 
me listen carefully to what the Lord will say in reply to these 
prayers. Surely it comes from his very nature that he will speak 
peace to his penitent, suppliant people. But let them stand to 
their professions of penitence ; let them persist in the ways of a 
reformed and holy life and not turn back again to their old sins — 
well spoken of here as "folly" 

9. Surely his salvation is nigh them that fear him ; that 
glory may dwell in our land. 

This word for "surely" so often means only that it may perhaps 
be better to read it so here. To those and those only who fear 
him, his salvation is nigh. This is always true, and the truth 
should forever bring assurance of hope to those who earnestly seek 

the Lord. "To the end that glory may dwell in our land" — 

" glory " in the sense of God's manifested presence, as in the visi- 
ble glory of the Holy of holies, the symbol of Jehovah's presence 
with his worshiping people. Thus understood the word carries 
with it all the subordinate manifestations of Jehovah's presence 
with his penitent people. 

10. Mercy and truth are met together ; righteousness and 
peace have kissed each other. 

11. Truth shall spring out of the earth ; and righteous- 
ness shall look down from heaven. 

Exegetically the first and main question here is whether these 
words — " mercy," " truth," " righteousness," " peace," are all to 
be taken as attributes of God, or whether part of them speak of 
qualities of men. Does the passage describe the harmonious inter- 
action of God's attributes ; or the reciprocity between God and man, 
i. e., the relation between God's manifested mercy and man's faith- 
ful obedience ; God's clemency and man's peaceful prosperity? 

V. 11 seems to favor the latter construction; truth springing up, 
like other growths, from the earth, while righteousness looks out 
and down upon the race from heaven. So also the previous con- 
text — salvation from God nigh to those among men who fear him ; 
i. <?., a beautiful commerce between the Father above and his 

children below. "Truth" will bear the sense of fidelity to 

covenant vows in the case of God's people and so be applicable to 
men. When truth on man's part, thus understood, and mercy on 

16 



358 



PSALM LXXXV. 



God's part, " meet togetlier," there is a loving accord between the 

true-hearted child and the beneficent Father. "Righteousness " 

here is not justice in its sternest aspect, but clemency — such as 
looks graciously from heaven upon humble penitents who put them- 
selves before God where he can forgive them freely, and as to the 
justice of his throne, safely. This quality of God's character 
insures the prosperity and peace of his children. Here, too, the 
clemency of God kisses the obedience of men and sheds forth on 
them the best of blessings — all peace and prosperity. 

These remarks give the reader one of the two possible construc- 
tions. There is another possible construction, the alternative of 
this. Between the two, our choice is to be made. It supposes 
that these four terms — mercy, truth, righteousness, peace — are all 
attributes of God. It also supposes that these, attributes are 
thought of here, not as they exist abstractly in the divine mind, 
but as they stand related to men. The conception is that the sins 
of men bring these qualities of 'the mind of God into struggle, not 
to say conflict ; while the penitence and obedience of men restore 
harmony. To put the case more plainly : When man sinned, God's 
justice said, man must die, and his truth was pledged to this 
penalty. But mercy — compassion — pleaded, struggled, and, shall 
we say it ? contested. There was conflict in the divine mind. So 

himself represents: "How shall I give thee up, Ephraim?" 

Now let the sinner become thoroughly penitent and humble. Let 
atonement provide for safe pardon, and let the sinner accept par- 
don on the basis of this atonement. Then all conflict in the divine 
mind ceases. Mercy and truth meet together; righteousness and 
peace kiss each other. There is untold joy in the bosom of infinite 

love ! This is the second construction. On either we must take 

the passage as poetry — genuine and beautiful poetry. These 
abstract qualities are personified ; they take on the forms and the 
spirit, too, of life. We may think of them as angels from the 
heavenly throne coming forth to manifest God to men, in the one 
case, to show the loving accord which reigns among all the elements 
of the infinite mind over and toward his creature man now that 
he is a penitent child; in the other, witnessing to the reciprocity 
of affection between the loving Father and his penitent children, 
and the free interchange and communion between the infinite 
and the finite, as in prayer offered — prayer answered ; obedience 

required, obedience paid. As to the choice between these two 

constructions ; it is easy to see that either brings out results that 
are true ; indeed that are very precious truth. It may perhaps be 
said that v. 10, taken apart from its connection, is explained more 
naturally on the last named construction than on the first. On the 
other hand, it must be admitted that the context favors the first 
named. The drift of thought here is of commerce between heaven 
and earth — transactions between the God above and his children 
below. God will speak peace to his people. His salvation is nigh 
to his hearers. Truth is thought of as springing up like other things 



PSALM LXXXVI. 



359 



that tow out of the earth ; while righteousness looks down lovingly 
fronihoaven. The Lord gives the good ; the land and man receive 
it. 

12. Yea, the Lord shall give that which is good ; and our 
land shall yield her increase. 

13. Kighteousness shall go before him ; and shall set us in 
the way of his steps. 

" The Lord will give the good " [So the Hebrew], i. e., the good 
promised in his word to the obedient; with probable reference to 
the standard passages in the Mosaic law, (e. Lev. 26; 3, 4, and 

Deut. 11 : 13-15, etc.). "Righteousness shall go before him" — 

be manifested continually in his presence. " And shall make 

his steps for a way " [so the Hebrew]— an expression which puts 
in strong light the example which God holds up before his people 
to guide their life and which had its full development when the 
Son of God, incarnate, planted his own foot-steps on this earth, 
and made them the way for his people's steps in all their earthly 
life. 

PSALM LXXXVI. 

On this Psalm the first question is that of authorship. The 
caption ascribes it to David. If so, in what sense is it his, and 
why does it appear in this third book (Ps. 73-89), in which we 
have no other Psalm ascribed to David and no other (probably) 

belonging to his age? The Psalm stands here preceded and 

followed by Psalms of the age of Hezekiah. It seems to be put 
here because offits natural and fit relations, both to the one before 
it and the one after it. It is also every way appropriate to the 
reformation under Hezekiah, when the nation went down upon its 
knees before God, and to Hezekiah personally, for he led the peo- 
ple in this humiliation and prayer for mercy. In what sense 
then is this a Psalm of David? Was it really written in this 
form by him, yet omitted — overlooked perhaps — in making up 
Book I (Ps. 1-41), which are exclusively his; and also in the 
compilation of Book II (Ps. 42-72), about half of which are his ? 
Did it afterward come to light and find place here because ap- 
propriate in this connection ? There is nothing impossible in 

these suppositions. Or, again, is it called Davids because, 

though written out by Hezekiah, it was made up by taking its 
several paragraphs from the earlier Psalms of David ? Shall it 
be regarded as precisely a compilation from various Psalms of 
David, brought together in the time of Hezekiah because specially 

appropriate to his times ? This may have been its history. 

Still another hypothesis assumes that Hezekiah was its author 
and is called David because he was a lineal descendant and king 
on David's throne, and bearing up the religious work of David 



360 



PSALM LXXXVI. 



pre-eminently. Those who adopt this hypothesis refer for author- 
ity t<3 the sons of Asaph and the sons of Korah, who each bore 
for ages the name of their father ; also to the well known fact 
that the Messiah as the prophetic son of David, bears in several 



again in Book IV, which has two Psalms under the name of David, 
and in Book V, which has fifteen. If the whole question turned 
on the merits of this particular case, either the first supposition 
or the second would be preferable to the third. 

This Psalm is pertinently called " a prayer." Every verse, 
every word, might be fitly used in prayer. It is also beautifully 
appropriate to the great reformation in the times of Hezekiah, 
and certainly not otherwise than appropriate to the case of David 
in the times of Absalom. But it seems to me most probable that 
the compilers put it here because of its fit connection with other 
contiguous Psalms of Hezekiah's time, and because of its actual 
use in that age. 

1. Bow down thine ear, O Lord, bear me : for I am 
poor and needy. 

2. Preserve my soul; for I am holy: O thou my God, 
save thy servant that trusteth in thee. 

As usual in the Psalms "poor" is frail, weak, dependent, not 

necessarily pennyless. " Preserve my soul," i. e., my life. 

" For I am holy " — in the sense of pious, one of thy devoted 

worshipers. Save thy servant who trusteth in thee — this being 

the plea: Will not the Great King take care of his trusting, faith- 
ful servants? 

3. Be merciful unto me, O Lord : for I cry unto thee 
daily. 

4. Kejoice the soul of thy servant : for unto thee, O 
Lord, do I lift up my soul. 

" Daily " — Hebrew, all the day— all the time, constantly. 

"Rejoice the soul" — make me exceedingly glad, Jill me with joy 
in thee, for I lift up my soul to thee for the full blessings of thy 
presence. 

5. For thou, Lord, art good, and ready to forgive; and 
plenteous in mercy unto all them that call upon thee. 

The argument here is drawn from God's declared and known 
nature. He proclaimed his name to Moses (Ex. 34: 5, 6), ex- 
panding the compassionate, forgiving, loving elements of his char- 
acter in times like these. 

6. Give ear, O Lord, unto my prayer : and attend to 
the voice of my supplications. 

7. In the day of my trouble I will call upon thee : for 
thou wilt answer me. 




This question will oome up 



PSALM LXXXVI. 



361 



We need never shrink from prayer because it is our time of 
trouble, so be it we have honestly served God in our better days. 
With all his heart the Lord invites his faithful ones to come to 
him in every trouble, and justifies the assurance expressed here : 
" for thou wilt answer me." 

8. Among the gods there is none like unto thee, O Lord ; 
neither are there any ivories like unto thy works. 

"Among the gods"— gods of the heathen, made with their own 
fingers. The Psalmist need not be supposed to imply that those 
gods are any thing at all beyond the wood and stone, the gold and 
silver, that make up their images. Infinitely far are they from 
being like the Lord Jehovah, the Maker and Former of all things. 
The last clause reads precisely : " And there is nothing like thy 
works." His thought is: Nothing which heathen gods profess to 
do can begin to compare with what thdU hast done. 

9. All nations whom thou hast made shall come and 
worship before thee, O Lord ; and shall glorify thy name. 

10. For thou art great, and doest wondrous things : thou 
art God alone. 

From the infinite superiority of the true God above all idols, the 
Psalmist comes to the grand result that the truth of the case will 
ultimately triumph; all the Heathen nations will one day cast 
away their empty gods and give their heart's entire love and hom- 
age to the Lord Jehovah. He loves to enlarge upon the reason 
why — " For thou art great ; thou doest wondrous things ; thou 
only art really God.' 1 This is a perfect reason. There is infinite 
fitness that the supreme and only God should at length place him- 
self at the head of this world, its acknowledged Lord and King — 
its one only object of supreme love and obedience. So let it be ! 
And let the time thereof hasten on ! 

11. Teach me thy way, O Loed ; I will walk in thy 
truth : unite my heart to fear thy name. 

Every word here is beautiful and strong. " Point out to me thy 
way ;" as with the extended finger, indicate the path for me to 
tread. I will walk earnestly — the intensive form of the Hebrew 
verb— in thy truth ; i. e., according to all which thy revealed truth 

shall prescribe. "Unite my heart;" combine all its utmost 

powers ; help me to concentrate every thought and affection upon 
filial, reverential obedience. Let not my heart be divided — given 
partly to other objects than thyself. 

12. I will praise thee, O Lord my God, with all my 
heart : and I will glorify thy name for evermore. 

13. For great is thy mercy toward me : and thou hast 
delivered my soul from the lowest hell. 



362 



PSALM LXXXVII. 



This is thoroughly in the spirit of the previous words — praise 
with all the heart, glorifying God's name, not transiently, not with 
fluctuating, fickle love, but most heartily and forever. The good 
and sumcient reason follows — " for thy mercy toward me is great, 
very great; thou hast rescued me from death — literally, "my life 
from the lower Sheol" — from going down to the under world. 
Hebrew usage compels us*to interpret this of natural death, from 
which the Psalmist had been delivered. See Ps. 6 : 5, and 88 ; 10- 
12, and 18 : 5, and Deut. 32 : 22, where these very words occur. 

14. O God, the proud are risen against me, and the 
assemblies of violent men have sought after my soul ; and 
have not set thee before them. 

15. But thou, O Lord, art a God full of eompassiou, and 
gracious, long-suffering, and plenteous in mercy and truth. 

Personally, this applies well to the case of David, long the object 
of Saul's vengeance ; then for a time, of the more organized assem- 
blies of violent men under military arms, headed by Absalom. 
Nationally, it meets the case of Hezekiah against whom the proud 
Assyrian came up with a mighty host and with no fear of God 
before his eyes. But the compassionate loving-kindness of Israel's 
God proved his refuge. 

16. O turn unto me, and have mercy upon me ; give thy 
strength unto thy servant, and save the son of thine hand- 
maid. 

17. Show me a token for good ; that they which hate me 
may see it, and be ashamed : because thou, Lord, hast 
holpen me, and comforted me. 

This prayer is for some visible manifestation of God's mercy to 
his people which shall command the attention of his enemies, shall 
confound them with shame and make them know that the Most 
High God has truly appeared for his people. The overthrow of 
the Assyrian host completely answered this prayer. God takes 
delight in hearing such prayer to the end of such results. It 
exalts his name and puts forward the great interests of his king- 
dom. 

oo^oo 

PSALM LXXXVII. 

This jubilant song by the sons of Korah must be dated in the 
times of Hezekiah for the following reasons : (a) Presumptively 
we may assume this because the Psalms that precede and that 

follow belong to those times. (b) The five Gentiles nations named 

here were prominent in that age, while in the age of David, Egypt 
was not known under the name Rahab, and Babylon was scarcely 



PSALM LXXXVII. 



363 



if at all known on the map of the nations. See Isa. 30 : 7, and 51 : 
9. The name appears also in Ps. 89 : 10, but this belongs to the age 
of Hezekiah. — (c) The prophetic sentiment of this Psalm, viz., the 
conversion of all the great nations of the earth to the true God, is 
remarkably in harmony "with the prophecies of Isaiah, which were 
suggested "by the same event — the fall of the Assyrian hosts and 
God's glorious triumphs therein. See Isa. 10-12, and 17 : 12-14, 
with chap. 18: 7, and 19 : 23-25 and my Notes on these passages. 
This coincidence is very remarkable, showing that this great 
thought was not in the mind of Isaiah alone but belonged to that 
age ; that the good men of Hezekiah's time saw in that wonderful 
overthrow of Assyria a sure presage of the fall of every opposing 
power and of the conversion of the great nations of the earth to 
the living God. 

1. His foundation is in the holy mountains. 

" His foundation " — the place of his abode, where the strong 
pillars of his earthly temple are laid — is in the holy mountains, 
i. <?., of Jerusalem, made sacred ages before by God's choice of 
them as the site of his house. The words chosen in this verse 
suggest firmness, stability, — a footing that can not be shaken. 

2. The Lord loveth the gates of Zion more than all the 
dwellings of Jacob. 

3. Glorious things are spoken of thee, O city of God. 
Selah. 

This special love for Zion had been evinced in his choice of her 
for the site of his tabernacle and temple. It had been demon- 
strated freshly in the fact that while the Assyrian host had swept 
the entire Northern kingdom, besieged and destroyed Samaria, and 
ravaged portions of the territory of Judah, the " daughter of Zion 
had laughed their king to scorn " (Isa. 37 : 22), and God had sig- 
nally avenged her upon her proud assailants. " Glorious things 

are spoken of thee, O city of God ! " Had the writer of this 
Psalm read the glowing and glorious words of Isaiah ? He began 
to prophecy in the reign of Uzziah who died at least thirty-two 
years before Hezekiah came to his throne, and forty-six years 
before Sennacherib's expedition and fall. Micah was of the same 
age ; indeed this was pre-eminently an age in which " glorious 
things were spoken of Zion." The spirit of exultant prophecy 
pervaded the inspired writers of that time. Well might the sons 
of Korah write "Selah" after the expression of a thought so sug- 
gestive. Let every reader pause and think of it ! In our times 
we may profitably read over and dwell long upon these "glorious 
things" as we find them in Isa. 2, and 9, and 11, and 12, and 35 ; 
not to name also his later prophecies — Chap. 42, and 49, and 54, and 
55, and 60, and 66 — also Micah 4 and 5. 

4. I will make mention of Rahab and Babylon to them 



364 



PSALM LXXXVII. 



that know me: behold Philistia, and Tyre, with Ethiopia; 
this man was born there. 

5. And of Zion it shall be said, This and that man was 
born in her : and the Highest himself shall establish her. 

6. The Lord shall count, when he writeth up the people, 
that this man was born there. Selah. 

As said above "Kahab" is but another name for Egypt, sig- 
nifying the proud one. " Them that know me," are my friends 
and people. To them God says, I will name Egypt and Babylon — 
the great rival nations of that and subsequent ages — as born to the 
God of Zion. See also Philistia, Tyre, Ethiopia ; this one, each 
and all of these, were born to God there, i. e., in Zion. " Man " 
is by no means the word to supply in the last clause of v. 4. This 
one means this nation, and in this connection, each of these 
nations. Of Zion it shall be said, this one and that one [not this 
man and that man] were born in her. In the writing up of the 
peoples brought home to God it shall be recorded that all these 
nations were born to him in Zion. This way of putting it, the 
reader will observe, is precisely that of all the Old Testament 
prophets. "The nations shall flow unto it," the mountain of the 
Lord's house. (Isa. 2: 2). "Many people and strong nations 
shall come to seek the Lord of Hosts in Jerusalem and to pray be- 
fore the Lord" (Zech. 8: 22). So throughout those ancient 
prophecies, the Gentile nations come up in vast masses, flying as 
doves to their window-cotes, to learn of God and to give him the 
homage of their hearts,* in Zion. A pious Hebrew, always trained 
to the idea of but one place for acceptable worship, could not think 
of the conversion of Gentiles as taking place in any other 

way. Here again "Selah" is altogether in place. Let all 

readers contemplate these marvelous things said of the future 
Zion of the Lord Jehovah. 

7. As well the singers as the players on instruments shall 
be there: all my springs are in thee. 

It seems better to supply the words, say, are saying, are pro- 
claiming aloud, rather than, " Shall be there," thus : Both the 
singers and the instrumental players [or dancers] are proclaiming, 
" All my springs are in thee." The whole chorus shout these 
richly expressive words: In God is the fountain of all my joy! I 
can trust him for all blessings on his Zion, and indeed, on the 

nations of the whole earth. "In thee" may perhaps refer 

primarily to Zion rather than directly to God; but if so, to Zion 
only as the place of Jehovah's manifestations, made sacred and 

lovely and a fountain of blessings only because God is there. 

For explanation of the word " springs " [" all my springs "] see 
Ps. 84: 6, also Joel 3: 18, and Zech. 13: 1, and 14: 8, and 
Ezek. 47; 1-12, also Isa. 12 : 3, and 35: 6, and 44; 3, 4. 



PSALM LXXXV1II. 



365 



PSALM LXXXVIII. 

This Psalm is more intensely and unqualifiedly plaintive than 
any other in the entire collection. The other plaintive Psalms 
have some shades of light — at least a little " silver lining to the 
cloud ; " but this, taken by itself, has none. We may emphasize 
the words, "taken by itself," and look at the evidence that the 
compiler (perhaps the writer) never intended it should stand by 
itself, out of connection with the Psalm next following. Observe 
the caption to Psalm 88 says, " a song ; " but in every other case 
the songs are jubilant — as this will be in a fair measure when 
associated with Ps. 89. But stronger yet is the circumstance that 
the closing verses of Ps. 89 (vs. 46-51) resume the tone and 
indeed the very words of this Psalm 88. The previous verses, 
especially vs. 1-37, give the consolatory side — the considerations, 
hopeful and inspiring, which relieve the darkness of the affliction. 
This fact certainly goes far to show that these two Psalms were at 
least compiled, if not composed, to go together — a pair, neither com- 
plete without the other. It does not forbid this conclusion that 
Heman wrote the one and Ethan the other, for they may have done 
their parts of the common work in concert. The unusually long 
and full caption to Ps. 88, may belong in a measure to both, Ps. 89 
having only the author's name, with no allusion to his subject. 

Before we attempt to locate these Psalms in history, it were well 
to settle this preliminary point : Are we to assume that this afflic- 
tion is personal, or is it only national ? Is this afflicted man, " I," 
an individual man, or a representative man speaking for the 

nation? 1 am compelled to take the former alternative — as 

being in harmony with all the other Psalms of kindred character ; 
as being the only natural hypothesis — and certainly the writing of 
the Bible is pre-eminently natural ; men speak and write as they 
feel. There is nothing here that looks like ideal painting — a set- 
ting forth of public calamity in words and figures borrowed from 
the individual life. I shall therefore assume that the writer repre- 
sents the personal individual sorrows, either of himself or of some 

other man. Can we locate this Psalm, or rather these two 

Psalms, in history? (1) The place assigned them by the com- 
pilers in this Book III, would put them in the age of Hezekiah. 
Eight Psalms immediately preceding (80-87) we have located in 
his age, as also Ps. 75 and 76. As these two (88 and 89) close the 

third Book, the presumptive evidence is strong for this date. (2) 

Conclusive to the same point is the striking harmony between these 
two Psalms on the one hand, and on the other the prayer and song 
of Hezekiah on the occasion of his sickness and recovery. These 
appear most fully in Isa. 38 — the prayer in brief ; the thanksgiving 
song in full. This song goes back to paint the bitterness and 
sorrow of his soul in the near prospect of death, making largely 
the same points which appear in Ps. 88. Then the covenant of 
God with David and his royal line, drawn out so fully and vividly 



366 



PSALM LXXXVIII. 



in Ps. 89 : 1-37 was manifestly the strong hold of Hezekiah in his 
prayer and is indicated in God's answer : " Thus saith the Lord, 
the God of David thy father." Comparing these Psalms with those 
fragmentary records, we can not say less than that these are a 
companion-piece to those — the same subject taken up by deeply 
sympathizing friends and filled out in form adapted to the public 
worship of the temple. ^ A matter of so deep public interest was 
surely a most appropriate theme for the songs of the sanctuary. 

The names of Heman and Ethan appear among the leading 

musicians 1 Chron. 15: 17, 19. The word "Mahalath" brings up 
the usual question between reference to a musical choir, the name 
of a tune, or the proper meaning of the word, viz., sickness. I 
favor the latter. See Ps. 53, the only other case of its similar use. 

" Leannoth "• means, to afflict, affliction, i. e., sickness for the 

purpose of moral trial. 

1. O Lord God of my salvation, I have cried day and 
night before thee : 

2. Let my prayer come before thee : incline thine ear unto 
my cry ; 

3. For my soul is fall of troubles : and my life draweth 
nigh unto the grave. 

The reader will note that this is most earnest prayer, most per- 
sistent also, "day and night," the reason assigned being — "my 
soul is full, sated, with the very utmost I can bear of trouble " — 
the comprehensive cause being a sickness that threatened speedy 
death. Such was the case with Hezekiah. He not only had upon him 
a disease usually fatal, but he had the very word of the Lord — " Set 
thy house in order, for thou shalt die and not live" (2 Kings 20 : 1). 

4. For I am counted with them that go down into the 
pit : I am as a man that hath no strength : 

5. Free among the dead, like the slain that lie in the 
grave, whom thou rememberest no more : and they are cut 
off from thy hand. 

" I am counted " — regarded as of those who are just going down 
into the grave. I am like a strong man, suddenly become power- 
less. The transition was most sudden from the vigor of the strong 

man * to the prostration of mortal sickness. In the phrase, 

"free among the dead," the word for "free" has been taken by 
many to be the Mosaic term for one emancipated — set free. But 
the problem then has been to find any proper application of the 
word in this sense to the present case. The later critics are re- 
lieved of this difficulty by taking the word in the sense of couch — 
" ray couch is with the dead." I am so near to the dead that I 
already seem to lie among them and to be of them.-* — "Whom 



-oj* 



PSALM LXXXVIII. 



367 



Thou rememberesfc no more ; they are cut off from thy hand," in 
the sense of being no longer the object of thy care, as the living 
are. This was one of the bitter things in this lot as it stood before 
the Psalmist's mind. So Hezekiah said, " 1 shall not see the Lord, 
even the Lord, in the land of the living ;" i. e., I shall no more see 
his faithful mercies as the true Jehovah, manifested to me. 

6. Thou hast laid me in the lowest pit, in darkness, in 
the deeps. 

7. Thy wrath lieth hard upon me, and thou hast afflicted 
me with all thy waves. Selah. 

" Afflicted me with all thy waves " reminds us of the words of 
David (Ps. 42 : 7) : "All thy waves and thy billows are gone over 
me;" and of Jonah: U A11 thy billows and thy waves passed over 
me " (Jonah 2 : 3) — as one cast away amid the rough breakers, 
every wave sweeping over him. 

8. Thou hast put away mine acquaintance far from me ; 
thou hast made me an abomination unto them : I am shut 
up, and I can not come forth. 

In what sense this was true of Hezekiah we know too little of 
his history to say positively, and should have the same difficulty 
in applying it to David at any point when he was, as here repre- 
sented, near death. May it be taken to express the feelings of 
one who seems to himself to move off alone, unattended, to go down 
the Jordan bank and launch away with none about him who can 
in any wise sympathize with the new, strange, and fearful facts of 
his case ? Does it not seem to him that they stand aloof as men 

stand afar from the leper ? He says, I am held fast by bands I 

can not sever, as within prison-walls from which I can not come 
forth. 

9. Mine eye mourneth by reason of affliction : Lord, I 
have called daily upon thee, I have stretched out my hands 
unto thee. 

"Mine eye mourneth 11 — but this word fails to give the full sense, 
which is ; my vision pales ; all things become dark. Yet, O Lord, 

how I have prayed, thou knowest ! Still thou nearest not. 

Hezekiah's prayer has the words : " Mine eyes fail with looking 
upward " (Isa. 38 : 14). 

10. Wilt thou show wonders to the dead ? shall the dead 
arise and praise thee ? Selah. 

11. Shall thy loving kindness be declared in the grave? 
or thy faithfulness in destruction ? 

12. Shall thy wonders be known in the dark? and thy 
righteousness in the land of forgetfulness ? 

All these questions are in one strain. " Wilt thou show won- 



3G8 



PSALM LXXXVIII. 



ders," i. e., of delivering mercy, of thine interposing hand — " to the 
dead ?" " Shall the dead 1 ' — a different word from the former and 
meaning the shades, the disembodied souls — shall they arise and 
praise thee ? This, it may be noted, was a leading point made in 
Hezekiah's song : " for the grave can not praise thee ; death can not 
celebrate thee ; they that go down into the pit can not hope for thy 
truth. The living, the living, he shall praise thee as I do this day " 

(Isa. 38 : 18, 19). " Selah " shows that this was a special 

point. " Thy faithfulness in destruction" — "destruction" being 

used synonymously with " grave. " In the dark," since they con- 
ceived of the under world as one of darkness. Job (10 : 21, 22) 
puts the ancient oriental view thus : " Before I go whence I shall 
not return, even to a land of darkness and the shadow of 
death ; a land of darkness, as darkness itself and of the shadow 
of death without any order and where the light is as darkness." 
"In the land of forgetfulness " may mean, not a land where the 
people thereof forget every thing and sink into unconsciousness, 
but a land where the people are soon forgotten by all the living. 
As Solomon has it : M The memory of them is forgotten ; they have 
no portion forever in any thing that is done under the sun " (Eccl. 

9 : 5, 6). The views of holy men at the age of this writing in 

regard to the state next after death have been discussed somewhat 
in my previous volumes, and need not be repeated here. See notes 
on Isa. 38 : 18, 19, and Eccl. 9 : 5, 6. 

13. But unto thee have I cried, O Lord ; and iu the 
morning shall my prayer prevent thee. 

" Prevent," as usual in Scripture in the sense of being before- 
hand, as if the suppliant would be on his knees before God in 
the earliest morning dawn. Of course this is speaking after the 
manner of men, with conceptions drawn from earthly thrones and 
their suppliants. 

14. Lord, why castest thou off my soul ? why hidest thou 
thy face from me ? 

15. I am afflicted and ready to die from my youth up : 
while I suffer thy terrors I am distracted. 

It is not clear why the w r riter should say — " Ready to die " 
[literally, dying — the present participle always for the present 
tense] — " from my youth up." It is, however, a fact of human 
experience that scenes of fearful suffering and terrible trial may 
take such exclusive possession of the mind as to cast all one's pre- 
ceding life into the shade and almost wipe it out from memory, 
leaving the present to seem to represent all the past. Perhaps this 

law of our mind gives the clew to the language before us. The 

tenses of the last clause are, " I have borne thy terrors ; I shall be 
distracted." 

16. Thy fierce wrath goeth over me ; thy terrors have cut 
me off. 



PSALM LXXXIX'. 



309 



17. They came round about me daily like water; they 
compassed me about together. 

18. Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and 
mine acquaintance into darkness. 

These words essentially repeat points previously made, but serve 
to show how intense his sufferings were and how fearful the trial 

to which his soul was subjected. But out of man's deepest, 

bitterest woes God can bring up his saints to sweet submission, 
placid trust, and joyful thanksgiving, as the case of Hezekiah bears 
witness, and as the next Psalm, taken as one of a pair with this, 
suffices to show. 

PSALM LXXXIX. 

In the remarks introductory to Ps. 88, it was suggested that 
this Psalm is one of a pair with that, both being of the times of 
Hezekiah, and occasioned by his extraordinary sickness, his sen- 
tence to death, his restoration in answer to prayer, and his 
thanksgiving song therefor. Heman and Ethan, doubtless personal 
friends of his, bearing responsibilities in the service of song in 
the house of the Lord, sometimes writing Psalms as well as con- 
ducting the music, may be supposed to have been perfectly in 
sympathy with him and competent to express his thoughts and 
emotions in Psalm and music adapted to public worship. He- 
man, in Ps. 88, gave exclusively the plaintive side. Ethan, during 
the greater part of Psalm 89, gives the joyful side — the consider- 
ations that sustain hope and faith in God, and especially such as 
were adapted to the case of Hezekiah. We can readily pee that 
the strong ground for him to rest on was God' s covenant with Da- 
vid for himself and his royal offspring. Hezekiah held his throne 
as one of that line. All his hopes therefore reposed on God's 
faithfulness to that covenant. That in vs. 38-51 Ethan reverts 
to the other side of the case, shows only that he proposes to give, 
not merely a part, but substantially the whole of Hezekiah's 
thoughts and feelings. The covenant itself provided that if Da- 
vid's posterity forsook God's law (vs. 30-32) he would visit their 
transgressions with the rod. Hezekiah's father, Ahaz, and his 
son, Manasseh, were both fearfully guilty, and both fell under this 
terrible scourge of God — not to say that Hezekiah had on his own 
personal account some reason to confess sin and implore forgive- 
ness and mercy. Hence these points belong legitimately in this 
Psalm. 

1. I will sing of the mercies of the Lord forever : with 
my mouth will I make known thy faithfulness to all gener- 
ations. 



370 PSALM LXXXIX. 

Assuming that Ethan proposes to himself to give a counter- 
piece to the song of Heman (Ps. 88), we may paraphrase this 
rerse thus : I admit there is a dark side to human life ; there are 
emergencies when clouds and darkness gather thick upon us, as 
we have seen in the case of our beloved king ; but there are bright 
scenes in human life as well as dark, and no darkness ought 
ever to shut off all thought of God's love to us; therefore ''let me 

sing the mercies of the Lord forever!" "Let me sing" he 

wrote, rather than precisely ''I will sing." Let me, for my heart 
is in it; I love it! Especially it was God's faithfulness to the 
promises he had made to David and his royal race which it was 
in his heart to celebrate. The good man then on the throne had 
ample reason to fall back upon those ever faithful promises as his 
refuge and consolation. Hezekiah need not fear the downfall of 
Judah's throne after what God had said to David. 

2. For I have said, Mercy shall be built up forever : thy 
faithfulness shalt thou establish iu the very heavens. 

3. I have made a covenant with my chosen, I have 
sworn unto David my servant, 

4. Thy seed will I establish forever, and build up thy 
throne to all generations. Selah. 

" Mercy shall be built up forever " — God's scheme of salvation 
shall move on to its consummation, developing itself more and 
more with the lapse of the ages. " The scheme of God's gracious 
dispensations is conceived of as a building already formed and 

hereafter to be carried up to its completion." (Alexander). 

That God's plans are thought of as more sure for being u estab- 
lished in the very heavens" pre-supposes that the scheme or plan 
is framed there, and made perfect there so as never to need or 

admit any subsequent change. This covenant made with David, 

guarantying the perpetuity of his throne, may be seen in 2 Sam. 

7, and 1 Chron. 17. " Selah " calls special attention to this 

great fundamental fact. 

5. And the heavens shall praise thy wonders, O Loed : 
thy faithfulness also in the congregation of the saints. 

"The heavens shall praise," etc., the glorious ones in the 
heavens, the word "heavens" being put for the inhabitants 
thereof. So the parallel clause demands, "The congregation of 
the saints," i. of the holy ones; not the word commonly applied 
to saints on the earth, but a word used of the holy in heaven, as 
may be seen Deut. 33: 2, 3, and Dan. 8: 13, and Zech. 14: 5, 

and Job 4 : 18, and 15 : 15. The sentiment is that the sinless 

beings in heaven recognize God's wonders of mercy, and rejoice 
in his faithfulness to his promises. 

6. For who in the heaven can be compared unto the 



PSALM LXXXIX. 



371 



Lord ? who among the sons of the mighty can be likened 
unto the Lord? 

7. God is greatly to be feared in the assembly of the 
saints, and to be had in reverence of all them that are about 
him. 

In heaven are beings greatly exalted, of lofty powers and spot- 
less character; yet who of them all can for a moment be com- 
pared to Jehovah? "Sons of the mighty," ["Elim"], the 

angels and archangels of that glorious world — the same who are 
called " saints " in v. 5. This great God is worthy of supreme 
reverence ; let all beings whether in heaven or earth accord it to 
him with all the heart ! 

8. ' O Lord God of hosts, who is a strong Lord like unto 
thee ? or to thy faithfulness round about thee ? 

Who is strong compared with thee, O Jehovah; and thy faith- 
fulness is inseparable from thyself, always round about thee, invest- 
ing thee with the honor of immutable veracity. The con- 
struction in the English version fails of the precise sense. It is 
not : Who is a strong Lord like thy faithfulness round about 
thee ; but rather, as an after thought, thus : Who is strong like 
thyself; and thy faithfulness is always with thee, encircling thee; 
never detached ; never absent. 

9. Thou rulest the raging of the sea : when the waves 
thereof arise, thou stillest them. 

10. Thou hast broken Kahab in pieces, as one that is 
slain; thou hast scattered thine enemies with thy strong 
arm. 

The great strength of Jehovah is the theme set forth here by its 
manifestations in nature. The swell of the sea ; all its rage and 
pride — how mightily dost thou rule it, how easily hush its breakers 

down to peace T "Rahab," a word signifying pride, but applied 

pertinently and often in this age to Egypt. This nation God had 
humbled in the greatness of her pride. Witness the plagues on 
her land and the burying of her chariots and horsemen in the 
Red Sea. 

11. The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for 
the world and the fullness thereof, thou hast founded them. 

12. The north and the south thou hast created them : 
Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in thy name. 

In v. 11 the founding or building and the sustaining on their 
enduring foundations pertain not merely to the world and what 
fills it, but to the heavens and the earth, thus: "Thine the 
heavens ; yea, thine the earth, the inhabited world and all that fill 
it — thou hast founded them, i. <?., them all. Creation and preser- 
vation are both embraced. Then the general idea is impressed by 



372 



PSALM LXXXIX. 



being expanded into its particulars; "The north and the south," 
the remote quarters of the earth in those directions, thou hast 
created; Tabor — the great mountain on the west; Hermon, the 
corresponding peak on the east, representing those quarters of the 
globe — all rejoicing in thy name, i. <?., in the ever present agencies 
of their great Creator and Preserver. Joyously do they repose 
under the eye and hand of their Almighty Maker ! 

13. Thou hast a mighty arm : strong is thy hand, and 
high is thy right hand. 

14. Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy 
throne : mercy and truth shall go before thy face. 

"An arm with might in it," is the expressive Hebrew 

phrase. "Justice and judgment are the habitation of thy 

throne ; " it seems to rest on those grand qualities of thy 
character. Yet thy justice and thy judgment never overrule 
mercy. Mercy and truth march in advance of thee, ever present, 
always of potent influence over all thou doest. 

15. Blessed is the people that know the joyful sound : 
they shall walk, O Lord, in the light of thy countenance. 

16. In thy name shall they rejoice all the day : and in 
thy righteousness shall they be exalted. 

Know what "joyful sound?" we must ask here, for the im- 
mediate antecdcnt is rather implied than expressed. The scopo 
of the context however is clear. Tabor and Hermon rejoice in 
God's name (v. 12); the whole earth is vocal with praises; the 
hosts of heaven bow reverently around the throne of Jehovah (vs. 
6-8) ; but most blessed are the people of earth who enter into 
these sympathies with all the holy in the universe of God and 
pour forth their souls in praise and adoration. There may perhaps 
be an allusion to the trumpet-call which convened the people for 
worship on their great festival days, designated by the very word 
used here. 

17. For thou art the glory of their strength : and in thy 
favor our horn shall be exalted. 

18. For the Lord is our defense ; and the Holy One of 
Israel is our King. 

" Through thy favor our horn shall be high ; " " horn " probably 
in the sense of king, who represented the strength of the nation, 
the horn being the symbol of strength, and the king being to the 
nation what the horn is to horned animals. [Daniel's visions 

chaps. 7 and 8 have the same symbolism — horn for king.] In 

v. 18, the more exact translation is; "For our shield belongs to 
Jehovah; our king to the Holy One of Israel." Our king is only 
the Lord's servant and therefore we may rely on the Lord to 
sustain him. 



PSALM LXXXIX. 



373 



19. Then thou spakest in vision to thy Holy One, and 
saidst, I have laid help upon one that is mighty ; I have 
exalted one chosen out of the people. 

20. I have found David ray servant ; with my holy oil 
have I anointed him : 

21. With whom my hand shall be established : mine arm 
also shall strengthen him. 

At this point the Psalmist reverts to the original call and anoint- 
ing of David by Samuel — his selection as a man after God's own 
heart to be king of Israel. 

22. The enemy shall not exact upon him ; nor the son 
of wickedness afflict him. 

23. And I will beat down his foes before his face, and 
plague them that hate him. 

24. But my faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him : 
and in my name shall his horn be exalted. 

"Exact upon him" — the verb being commonly used for the ex- 
actions of the usurer. 

25. I will set his hand also in the sea, and his right hand 
in the rivers. 

A remarkable expression, meaning : I will give him power from 
sea to sea, and even to the great rivers of the world, the Euphrates 
and the river of Egypt, both of which are named in the boundaries 
of the land promised to Abraham's seed. 

26. He shall cry unto me, Thou art my Father, my God, 
and the Rock of my salvation. 

Filially trusting me, he shall address me as Father, God, the 
Rock of liis salvation. This was prominent in the promise as sent 
through Nathan: "I will be his Father and he shall be my son." 
See also how David repeats it to his son Solomon (1 Chron. 22: 10). 

27. Also I will make him my first-born, higher than the 
kings of the earth. 

28. My mercy will I keep for him for evermore, and my 
covenant shall stand fast with him. 

29. His seed also will I make to endure forever, and his 
throne as the days of heaven. 

Somewhat more than merely a son — he shall be my first-born, 
ray specially favored son. The peculiar relation of Israel to the 

Lord is indicated by the same term (Ex. 4: 22, and Jer. 31 : 9). 

The points made prominent here, viz., the perpetuity of this cove- 
nant and its eternal stability, lead the thought onward to David'a 
greater son, the Messiah, in whom only were these points perfectly 
fulfilled. 



374 



PSALM LXXXIX. 



30. If his children forsake my law, and walk not in my 

judgments; 

31. If they break my statutes, and keep not my com- 
mandments ; 

32. Then will I visit their transgression with the rod, 
and their iniquity with stripes. 

Such promises were liable to grievous abuse by unworthy suc- 
cessors on this throne of David. Hence this admonition — so terri- 
bly effective to the chastisement of the wicked kings in David's 
line. 

33. Nevertheless my loving-kindness will I not utterly 
take from him, nor suffer my faithfulness to fail. * 

34. My covenant will I not break, nor alter the thing 
that is gone out of my lips. 

Chastisements and even judgments may be demanded upon cor- 
rupt individuals in this royal line, but these shall not impair the 
validity of the covenant. Noticeably the covenant runs sure, not 
to them — all the members in this line — but to him, David, as the 

representative of the line. Taking into view the frailty of man 

in his best estate, and the degeneracy incident to royal families, this 
must be accounted one of the most precious features in this cove- 
nant. God would not let the corruption and moral failure of indi- 
vidual kings in this line go to impair the covenant itself. That 
should not be vitiated. What God had said should absolutely stand. 
The grand idea of one great anointed king in this royal line, to be- 
come King of kings and Lord of lords, was in this covenant, and 
no delinquencies of human sort, anywhere along the intermediate 
links from David to Christ, could be allowed to vacate the glorious 
promise, or work, on God's part, a repudiation of his covenant. 

35. Once have I sworn by my holiness that I will not lie 
unto David. 

36. His seed shall endure forever, and his throne as the 
sun before me. 

37. It shall be established forever as the moon, and as a 
faithful witness in heaven. Selah. 

"Once" — not in the sense of one particular time, as this word 
should naturally mean, but one thing — one point I have made sure 
by my solemn oath, and in this I will never prove false to David ; 
viz., the perpetuity of his throne in his posterity. That greater 
Son who shall pre-eminently bear up his name, and in whom alone 
this covenant is to have its ultimate, unquestionable, sublime ful- 
fillment, shall reign forever ; his throne shall outlast the sun ; of 
his dominion there shall be no end. The Hebrew writers give us 
their strongest averments of indefinitely long duration — of things 
that shall stand while the world shall last— by comparing them 



PSALM LXXXIX. 375 

with the life of the sun and of the moon. V. 37 naturally reads : 
" As the moon shall it [his throne] stand forever, and the witness 
in the heavens is sure" — the moon on the sky, and the sun per- 
haps as well, are the witness that God has measured the duration 
of this promise by the existence of the sun and the moon, hung 
out before mortal eyes in the heavens. "Selah" fitly calls for 
special attention and meditation here, before the Psalmist passes 
on to other points. 

38. But thou hast cast off and abhorred, thou hast been 
wroth with thine anointed. 

39. Thou hast made void the covenant of thy servant : 
thou hast profaned his crown by casting it to the ground. 

The sudden and entire change in the course of thought at this 
point must strike every reflective reader as very extraordinary. 

It might seem to reverse the very declarations just made. The 

probable explanation is, that under the presence and pressure of 
severe calamity, befalling the reigning monarch and the people as 
well, it really appeared as if God had broken his covenant, dishon- 
ored the crown of his own anointed One, given him up to reproach, 
and the whole people to ruin. The tone is singularly outspoken, 
not to say bold and almost irreverent. We have a case quite anal- 
ogous in Ps. 44 : 9-26. " Profaned his crown to the earth " — 

as if God had taken it from his head and thrown it into the dust. 

40. Thou hast broken down all his hedges ; thou hast 
brought his strongholds to ruin. 

41. All that pass by the way spoil him: he is a reproach 
to his neighbors. 

The same figure — a vineyard enclosed with hedge — appears in 
Ps. 80. In righteous chastisement of his guilty people, God suf- 
fered the natural defenses of the land to be broken down, and 
their military strongholds to be demolished — to their reproach be- 
fore their enemies. 

42. Thou hast set up the right hand of his adversaries ; 
thou hast made all his enemies to rejoice. 

43. Thou hast also turned the edge of his sword, and 
hast not made him to stand in the battle. 

44. Thou hast made his glory to cease, and cast his throne 
down to the ground. 

45. The days of his youth thou hast shortened : thou hast 
covered him with shame. Selah. 

In v. 44 we should read literally, " Thou hast made him to cease 
from his brightness," i. e., thou hast dimmed the glory and bril- 
liancy of his throne. "Hast shortened the days of his youthful 

vigor,"— made him prematurely old and feeble. Whether the 



* 



376 PSALM LXXXIX. 

historical facts referred to here — the basis of these statements- 
were in the sickness of Hezekiah, or in the greater public calami- 
ties in the reign of Manasseh, it is not perhaps possible to deter- 
mine. 

46. How long, Lord? wilt thou hide thyself forever? 
shall thy wrath burn like fire ? 

47. Remember how short my time is : wherefore hast thou 
made all men in vain ? 

48. What man is he that liveth, and shall not see death ? 
shall he deliver his soul from the hand of the grave? 
Selah. 

The implied solecism of the question, " How long wilt thou hide 
thyself forever?" may be obviated by making two questions: How 
long ? Shall it be forever ? Or thus : How long shall it seem to 
us that thou has cast us off finally and forever ? Or, modifying the 
word rendered forever : How long wilt thou continue to cast us off 

with no relaxation of thy purpose ? " Think how short human 

life is " at best — a strain of appeal analogous to that of Hezekiah 

(Isa. 38 : 12). "Wherefore hast thou made man so mere a 

vanity," so like an empty breath? — expostulations extorted by 
painful and to human view disastrous death, either transpiring or 
near impending. 

49. Lord, where are thy former loving-kindnesses, which 
thou swarest unto David in thy truth ? 

It seemed that those rich loving-kindnesses promised to David 
and shown so munificently to him had disappeared and were no 
more — were exhausted and naught of them remained ! Literally 
the verse has two distinct clauses : " Where are thy former loving- 
kindnesses, O Lord ?" " Thou didst sware unto David in thy truth." 
How then comes it to pass as we see it now ? 

50. Remember, Lord, the reproach of thy servants ; how 
I do bear in my bosom the reproach of all the mighty people ; 

51. Wherewith thine enemies have reproached, O Lord ; 
wherewith they have reproached the footsteps of thine 
anointed. 

"The reproaches of thy servants" — i. e., which they suffer. 

The next clause stands in Hebrew — " my bearing in my bosom all 
the mighty people" — which might mean: I bear all their sympa- 
thies ; or all their responsibilities; or all their reproaches. The word 
" peoples " connected with many [better than " mighty "J must refer 
to Gentile nations. Is there not here an allusion to the promise that 
all these nations shall yet come to Zion as proselytes to the true God ; 
and that this suppliant implores God to remember that Zion bears on 
her heart this promise and asks how it shall ever be fulfilled if the 
then present state of things is permitted ? In v. 51, the word " re- 



PSALM XC. 



377 



member" must be brought forward from the verse previous: 
"Remember, Lord, how thine enemies have reproached — havo 
reproached the footsteps of thine Anointed." Ought not such 
reproach to receive thine attention ? Here the Psalm closes. 

52. Blessed be the Lord for evermore. Amen, and 
Amen. 

This doxology is properly the close of Book III of the Psalter. 
A similar emphatic doxology and double "Amen" appear at the 
close of the first book (Ps. 41 : 13) and of the second (Ps. 72 : 19). 



PSALM XC. 

This first Psalm in Book IV is the oldest in the entire collection. 
There is every reason to regard this as a genuine relic of what was 
even then a remote antiquity — a Psalm written by Moses near the 
close of the forty years' wandering in the wilderness.— ; — Its deep 
minor strain is readily accounted for. When the nation was less 
than two years out from Egypt, Moses sent twelve spies from 
Kadesh-barnea into Canaan to explore the land and report back 
to the people. Ten of the twelve brought back a report full of 
unbelief — its conclusions based on an utter lack of faith in God ; 
and this in the face of all God had wrought for them in the plagues 
on Egypt, in the passage of the Bed Sea and the glories of Sinai. 
The masses of the people sympathized but too deeply in this utter 
unbelief. The Lord's indignation against the people was deeply 
stirred, and he swore in his wrath that not a man of all that gene- 
ration, then over twenty years of age, should ever enter Canaan, 
save the two faithful men, Caleb and Joshua. They were doomed 
to wander during forty years up and down in that wilderness, to 
be thinned out by pestilence ; hastened to their early graves by 
special judgments for special sins; or swept off under the general 
doom of an early death, till within forty years that whole genera- 
tion of adult men were dead. Therefore when the nation neared 
at once the confines of Canaan and the close of that forty years, 
Moses, then the solitary patriarch of one hundred and twenty 
years, with eye undimmed and "natural force unabated" (Deut. 
34 : 7), looked abroad upon the face of his people whom he had led 
through all their wilderness life, and saw not a man among them 
(save the two faithful spies) over sixty years of age. " The fathers, 
where were they?" The patriarchs, hoary with years, venerable 
in age — the men whose years counted like Jacob's [147] ; like 
Joseph's [110]; or like the Levite stock [Levi, 137; Kohath, 133; 
Amram, 137 (Ex. 6 : 16, 18, 20)]— where were they ? Alas, the old 
men were not there ! One whole class in human society was utterly 
blotted out ! Save Caleb and Joshua, Moses could not see a man 
whose years numbered more than half his own. He was an old 



378 



psalm xe. 



man among a nation of children. He had long out-lived his gener- 
ation. The men he had familiarly known in his boyhood were 
long since in their graves. And when he asked for the cause of 
this sad experience — the reason of these appalling facts — the 
answer was but too obvious — these early deaths came in judgment 
from God for their sins. It was under the wrath of God for their 
guilty unbelief that they perished long ere the usual race of human 

life was run. It was amid these surroundings that Moses wrote 

this Ps. 90. It was the natural outgrowth of such circumstances. 
The sad spectacle before his eyes drew forth these plaintive strains 
of poetry and song from his stricken heart. It has been the lot of 
few men if any in the whole range of our world's history to live 
for years together amid bereavements so long continued, so un- 
sparing, so universal — exempting but two men of his own genera- 
tion ; yet there have been hearts in plenty to respond somewhat to 
the mournful strains of this Psalm. Ah, who has not wept over 
early made graves, over dear ones cut down, according to our short 
vision, too soon ! If death is because of sin, and if its fearfulness 
measures God's estimate of human guilt, then who has not had 
abundant occasion to see that in God's sight it is a bitter thing 
that a race has gone into rebellion against its Great Maker and 
Father ? Who will not pray with Moses that God would soften 
these strokes of his hand, all he wisely can, and let his mercy 
shine out early and long, lest his creatures sink beneath his rod ? 

It is not a question of merely idle curiosity — Why does this 
Psalm of Moses stand here at the head of Book IV rather than 
at the head of Book I, according to its age, or rather than any- 
where else? This Book, IV (Ps. 90-106) is made up chiefly of 

Psalms composed in the last reigns of the Jewish Kings, preced- 
ing the captivity — say from Manasseh, where Book HI ends, to 
the fall of the city before the Chaldeans. If we may suppose it 
to have been compiled by Jeremiah (a suggestion I do not remem- 
ber to have met with) we have at least two obvious reasons for 
placing this Psalm by Moses at the head of it: (a) That the appall- 
ing national mortality which drew forth this Psalm originally from 
the heart of Moses was reproduced before the eyes of Jeremiah. 
He too saw a nation melting rapidly away ; its sons and daughters, 
its fathers and mothers falling thick and fast like the leaves of 

autumn. (b) This Psalm met a quick response from the heart 

of " the weeping prophet." If we might suppose that various other 
compilers might miss its exquisite beauty, or fail to feel the whole 
force of its sentiments, we may be sure not a word could be lost 
on the heart of Jeremiah. He could not overlook, could not omit, 
this wonderful Psalm. 

The reader will note that the caption speaks of this not as a 
" Psalm " or " Song" but as a " prayer." And not inappropriately. 
It is throughout addressed to God. There is not a word in it out 
of place for a prayer. After the case is fully presented before 
the Lord, the strain of it is closely and constantly that of suppli- 



PSALM XO. 



379 



cation (vs. 12-17). In Deut. 33 : 1, Moses is called as here, 

"The man of God" — in words not of Moses himself but of his 
compiler; also in Josh. 14: 6 — the words of Caleb; and in Ezra 
3 : 2 — the words of Ezra. A few other distinguished prophets 

have been so called ; none more fitly than Moses. As to the 

internal evidence that Moses wrote this Psalm, Dr. Alexander has 
well condensed the points thus : " Its unique simplicity and gran- 
deur, its appropriateness to his times and circumstances, its resem- 
blance to the Law in urging the connection between sin and 
death ; its similarity of diction to the poetical portions of the Pen- 
tateuch, without the slightest trace or imitation or quotation ; its 
marked unlikeness to the Psalms of David, and still more to those 
of later date; and finally, the proved impossibility of plausibly 
assigning it to any other age or author." (Vol. II: pg. 295). 

1. Lord, thou hast been our dwelling-place in all genera- 
tions. 

"Our dwelling-place" — our home [so the Hebrew] or place of 
rest. Banging this houseless desert; plowing these trackless 
sands ; clambering these stony hills ; threading these treeless val- 
leys, with never a place of rest anywhere to the soles of our weary 
feet — such is our life, and it is only when our eye rests on the 
pillar of thy glory standing above our sacred tent that we get the 
first idea of a home. In a wilderness, if God dwells in it, there 
may be a home, but it must be in God only. So it was with our 
fathers, the patriarchs, in their wanderings. Their God was their 
dwelling-place through all their generations. Apart from God 
there was no sense of home in their souls. 

2. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou 
hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlast- 
ing to everlasting, thou art God. 

The conceptions are poetic : " Before the mountains were born, 
or ere thou hadst brought forth the earth" [this globe] "and the 
world" [the surface considered as inhabited]. "From ever- 
lasting to everlasting " — back into the depths of a past eternity 
and onward through the measureless years of the future, thou art 
evermore the same — the Mighty God ["El"]. The course of 
thought seems to be : Thou, O Jehovah, who hast been the dwell- 
ing-place of all the patriarchs — of Abraham and Jacob, of Enoch 
and of Abel — there is no measuring thine endless years. The 
longest human lives are less than units in this poor attempt toward 
a time-computation of thy being. 

3. Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, 
ye children of men. 

But man's days are far otherwise. Alas, the contrast ! " Thou 
turnest man to destruction" the word used by Moses signifying a 
thing smitten and broken into fine dust. The conception seems to 
be that man made of the dust of the earth is crushed and broken 



380 



PSALM XC. 



till he is reduced to his original dust. It is put here as a second 
fiat of the Almighty ; the first (ideally) summoning him forth from 
dust into organized body instinct with life ; the second, remanding 
him back again : Return to your primeval dust, ye sons of men ! 
It is in point here to recall the words of the Lord to Adam, then 
representing the race : " Dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt 
return" (Gen. 3: 19). Compare also Job 10: 9, and 34: 14, 15. 

4. For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yester- 
day when it is past, and as a watch in the night. 

It is at least supposable that one thousand years is first thought 
of as proximately the extreme duration of antediluvian life. To 
Moses and to the men of his time, those human lives seemed very 
long; but what were they in the eye of God measured against his 
immortal years ? Only like yesterday when it is gone — swallowed 
up in the great abyss of the Past ; or like a watch (then the third 

part only) of a single night. The words of Peter (2 Eps. 3 : 8) 

seem to be borrowed from this Psalm : " One day is with the Lord 
as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day." What are 
years to him whose years no lapse of time can lessen, and no 
count of ages on ages can ever begin to exhaust ! 

5. Thou earnest them away as with a flood ; they are as 
a sleep : in the morning they are like grass which growetk 
up. 

6. In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up ; in the 
evening it is cut down, and withereth. 

The first clause is made in Hebrew by one most expressive word 
for which we have no precise equivalent. We might say : Thou 
floodest them, save that the sense is, not pouring water over them, 
but sweeping them away as with a deluge, a mighty inundation. 

"Asleep are they," evanescent as a dream, or rather perhaps 

suggesting that, compared with the immortal untiring activities of 
the Infinite One, the whole of human life is but that dreamy, 

torpid thing we call sleep. Or again, human life is as the grass 

whose whole duration of shooting up, blossoming, being cut down 
and withering, is pressed within one brief day — beginning with a 
morning, ending at the night. Alas, that such a figure should 
measure human life on earth ! 

7. For we are consumed by thine anger, and by thy 
wrath are we troubled. 

8. Thou hast set our iniquities before thee, our secret 
sins in the light of thy countenance. 

9. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath: we 
spend our years as a tale that is told. 

"By thy wrath are we troubled," but the word used by Moses 
is much stronger than merely "troubled." It implies being cut 
off, destroyed— in forms moreover of overwhelming terror. "In 



PSALM XC. 



381 



the light of thy countenance," but this word for " light " means 
not precisely the light itself, but the source of light, the luminous 
body which supplies the light — the conception being, it would seem, 
that God's face is itself a sun, and he brings our secret sins forth 
and holds them before the face of this sun of the moral 

universe! These verses come to the great question of the 

reason why. How comes it to pass that man's life is so short, his 
life-power so frail ? Why are we so soon and so suddenly " con- 
sumed? " The answer is found in God's wrath toward man's sin. 
That terrible mortality which so soon swept off the entire adult 
population came of God's indignation toward them for their un- 
belief. They would not believe in his power to save though he 
had wrought most glorious and most palpable wonders of salvation 
before their very eyes and for their very selves ! Those guilty 
sins God could not hide ; and would not, must not, pass over ! 
No, he must lift them up before the ages of history — spread them 
forth before earth and heaven, and let it be seen how much he felt 
insulted and abused that his people would not believe in his love, 
would not trust his power to save ! It was a moral lesson written 
in blood, uttered in the groans of the dying, set forth in the 
ghastliness of ten thousand deaths ; but there was a demand for 
it, and even God's compassion could not spare it! So all death 
follows sin and comes because sin has gone before. 

9. For all our days are passed away in thy wrath : we 
spend our years as a tale that is told. 

The original words suggest ideas of this sort : For all our days 
turn and go under thy wrath; we consume [use up] our years 
quick as a thought. Almost in less time than we can think, they 
are gone ! It seems to us that God's wrath for our sins abides on 
us through all this fleeting life. 

10. The days of our years are threescore years and ten ; 
and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is 
their strength labor and sorrow ; for it is soon cut off, and 
we fly away. 

Quite abruptly and half as an exclamation, the Psalmist wrote : 
" The days of our years — in them are seventy years ; and if with 
strength they are eighty years, yet their pride is labor and sorrow, 
for it hastens fast and we fly away ! " " Their pride" — the best 
of man's days, or the manly vigor which is his chief glory. The 
average term of man's life-power is put at seventy years, shortened 
greatly from the years of their fathers before them. The re- 
corded years of those who went down into Egypt with Jacob, 
range more nearly at twice seventy. But the men like Moses, of 
undimmed eye and unwasted life-force at one hundred and 
twenty, were at this writing no more to be found. 

11. Who knoweth the power of thine anger ? even accord- 
ing to thy fear, so is thy wrath. 

17 



382 



PSALM XC. 



"Who knows the force [and the results] of thine anger so as to 
appreciate thy wrath in the spirit of godly fear ? Or the last clause 
thus : Who estimates thine indignation according to the fear it 

should impress? It seems quite plain that the question "Who 

knoweth?" should grammatically govern the last words of the 
verse ["thy wrath"] as really as the preceding phrase, "the 
power of thine anger." The entire sentiment of the verse, there- 
fore, is : Who has ever fully comprehended the power and the 
results of God's displeasure against sin, as we see them in the 
universal mortality of the race, and in all the pains and woes 
which fill this earthly life ? Who estimates this with such fear 
of God as the facts inspire ? 

12. So teach us to number our days, that we may apply 
our hearts unto wisdom. 

Help us to make such an estimate of life as shall insure real 
wisdom — literally, " that we may acquire a heart of wisdom." It 
is not merely, as in our English version, that we may set ourselves 
to the study of wisdom, but that we may truly gain it. 

13. Keturn, O Lord, how long? and let it repent thee 
concerning thy servants. 

A prayer that God would turn his hand to blessings and mercies. 
"Return," to visit thy people with good, and let thy compassion be 
moved toward thy suffering servants. This seems to be the precise 
thought of the Hebrew verb which the English version puts : 
" Let it repent thee." 

14. O satisfy us early with thy mercy ; that we may re- 
joice and be glad all our days. 

" Satisfy us with thy mercy in the morning," [Hebrew] — soon, 
speedily, early in our day of brief life, so that we may have joy and 
gladness all our days, instead of spending them all in misery and woe. 

15. Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast 
afflicted us, and the years wherein we have seen evil. 

Let the years of our joy in the future be as the years of our 
sorrow in the past. Let a new era dawn upon us of joy and peace, 
no less long than the sad years of pestilence and death, through 
which we have wended our sorrowing way. 

16. Let thy work appear unto thy servants, and thy 
glory unto their children. 

1 7. And let the beauty of the Lord our God be upon us : 
and establish thou the work of our hands upon us ; yea, 
the work of our hands establish thou it. 

Let us see thy work of redeeming mercy and saving power ; let 
thy glory be displayed before the eyes of our children ; let the 
beauty [i. e., grace] of Jehovah, our covenant God, be upon us; 



PSALM XCI. 



383 



make our great national work successful, and confirm every word 
of thy covenant in the gift of Canaan, and in making its posses- 
sion firm and sure to the generations of Israel. This I take to 

be the primary sense of this closing prayer of Moses— a prayer 
which sacred history shows to have been abundantly fulfilled to 
those very children whose fathers fell so fearfully in the wilderness. 
The generation that went over into Canaan under Joshua had the 
fear of God before their eyes and stood up staunchly to the obli- 
gations of their holy covenant. The Almighty God therefore 
placed himself at the head of their marching hosts ; his own work- 
ing hand appeared manifestly unto his servants, his glory to their 
children ; and Canaan was indeed established unto Israel for an 
everlasting possession. 

PSALM XCI. 

This Psalm would be full of interest, found anywhere, standing 
in any relations; but has peculiar interest standing here in mani- 
festly close relations to Psalm 90. The slightest attention to these 
two Psalms will show that they are paired together, the second a 
counterpart to the first. The prayer of Moses has in its fore- 
ground a sweeping mortality among the people of Israel. It speaks 
therefore of human frailty ; of man returning back to dust, and of 
man's sin as calling forth the high displeasure of his Maker and 
demanding such a demonstration of it as the cutting off of a whole 

generation in the freshness of their manhood. But this somber 

view of human life should not stand alone. There are exceptional 
cases. Even then when Moses wrote Ps. 90 there were before him 
Caleb and Joshua, hale and strong ; Caleb eighty years old when 
the nation crossed the Jordan, and Joshua one hundred and ten at 
his death, and, as is supposed, ninety-three at the entrance into 
Canaan. Caleb testifies of himself (Josh. 14: 10, 11) — "Behold, 
the Lord hath kept me alive as he said these forty-five years even 
since the Lord spake this word unto Moses while the children of 
Israel wandered in the wilderness ; and now, lo, I am eighty-five 
years old. As yet I am as strong this day as I was in the day 
that Moses sent me (i. e., to spy out the land); as my strength was 
then, even so is my strength now for war, both to go out and to 
come in." And Joshua also, aged from ninety-three to one hun- 
dred, seems to have been hale and strong for the hardships of 
war. So that something should be said touching the strain of this 
Ps. 90 by way of exception. It should be said that those who live 
near to God shall abide under his protection ; shall be shielded 
against the pestilence, protected from the fierce lion and poisonous 
adder, put under the charge of God's sleepless angels to be kept 
in all their ways, and crowned with the blessings of long life and 

God's full salvation. Such is the tone of Ps. 91. It scarcely 

need be said that these Psalms belong to an age when present 
retribution was far more fully the law of the divine hand toward 



384 



PSALM XCI. 



men than in this latter dispensation. It was an age when he 
who honored father and mother enjoyed long life on the land the 

Lord had given to his people. Such being the scope of this 

Psalm and such its relations to Psalm 90, the question of author 
becomes one of special interest. Who wrote it ? Can we get any 

light on this point ? It stands with no caption. The compilers 

are silent as to author, date, or occasion. But perhaps this very 
silence is itself suggestive. The ancient Jewish doctors held that 
a subsequent Psalm, entirely without caption, came under the cap- 
tion of its immediate predecessor; stood in special relation to it; 
was indeed one of a pair with it, written on the same occasion, 
and (so they held) by the same author. And it must be admitted 
that this doctrine holds good throughout the first three books. 
The reader may easily examine the cases, viz.,Ps. 1 and 2; Ps. 9 
and 10; Ps. 32 and 33; Ps. 42 and 43 ; and Ps. 70 and 71. Here 
are five pairs of Psalms, all sustaining the ancient rule of the 

Jewish doctors. The Jewish doctrine in respect to this coupling 

of Psalms — the second without caption and therefore by the same 
author — is not a little strengthened by the fact that at least 
throughout the first three books no other Psalms but these thus 
coupled stand without caption. All the rest have some word from 
the compilers at their head. In Books IV and V it is not so easy 
to detect the law of compilation. But as the case stands there is 
a somewhat strong presumption that they considered Moses the 
author of Ps. 91 as well as of Ps. 90. It is at least quite certain 
that they regarded Ps. 91, by whomsoever written, as a counterpart 
of Ps. 90. And this is the point of chief importance to its just 
interpretation.* 

1. He that dwelleth in the secret place of the Most High 
shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty. 

The word for "dwelleth " might equally well be translated sit- 
teth, i. e., under the covert, in the hiding-place, the sequestered 
shelter of the Most High. This man " shall abide," lodge all 
night and by consequence perpetually, under the shadow of the 
Almighty. The sense, He who lives in great nearness to God, 
making God his trust and refuge, may expect permayient protection. 
Stress is laid upon God's infinite power to shield his trustful peo- 

® A certain class of critics have unlimited confidence in their ability to 
determine who wrote (e. g.) this Ps. 91 from its style, from its words, 
grammatical forms, etc. In my view this sort of criticism has been 
greatly overdone and its value overestimated. For what forbids (in this 
case) that some later author should have wrought into this Psalm many 
of the words and expressions that occur in the poetical writings of Moses ? 
On the other hand, who knows the whole range of the vocabulary of 
Moses? What forbids that he should put into this Ps. 91 some words 
found in none of his other songs ? If we had in hand whole volumes 
from his pen, we might prepare ourselves to draw conclusions respecting 
his authorship of a given Psalm from his style, his choice of words. But 
at present our data are too limited to justify very positive conclusions 
from this sort of evidence. 



PSALM XCI. 



385 



pie by the choice of those names for God which make his power 
prominent. Who can be otherwise than safe with the Almighty 
God for his Protector ? 

2. I will say of the Lord, lie is my refuge and my 
fortress : my God ; in him will I trust. 

3. Surely lie shall deliver thee from the snare of the fow- 
ler, and from the noisome pestilence. 

4. He shall cover thee with his feathers, and under his 
wings shalt thou trust: his truth shall be thy shield and 
buckler. 

The Hebrew has it, not of the Lord, but to the Lord; "I will 
say to the Lord:" My Refuge and Fortress art thou, etc. "In 
him will I trust," changes from the second person to the third, a 
change not uncommon in Hebrew, but especially frequent in this 

Psalm. " The snare of the fowler," which may represent any 

form of danger. Covered under wings and feathers is a favorite 
Hebrew figure, open to the most common observation in the 
habits of domestic fowls. Our Lord has it in beautiful form 
(Matt. 23 : 37). 

5. Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night ; nor 
for the arrow that flieth by day ; 

6. Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness ; nor 
for the destruction that wasteth at noonday. 

The timid will readily feel the fitness and force oi> this de- 
scription — " the terror by night." The warriors of that age would 

know the meaning of " the arrow that flieth by day." Full of 

pertinence is the description of the pestilence — " walking in dark- 
ness " — moving stealthily upon us in miasms which no human eye 
can detect, in malarious influences impalpable to every sense, but 
terrible in their power over the stoutest human frame. The de- 
struction wasting at noonday is the same thing in other words. 

Here is probably a tacit allusion to those plagues that fell 

from the Lord upon the rebellious Hebrews in the wilderness. 
(See e. g., Num. 11 : 32, and 16 : 46-49, and 25 : 8, 9). 

7. A thousand shall fall at thy side, and ten thousand at 
thy right hand ; but it shall not come nigh thee. 

8. Only with thine eyes shalt thou behold and see the 
reward of the wicked. 

God can throw over his favored ones a protecting shield, proof 
against the most malignant malaria. When the plague is sweep- 
ing off its thousands at thy side, his voice can say with power : 
"It shall not come nigh thee." Thou shalt lift up thine eyes 
round about and see the retribution that is falling on the wicked. 
Such was precisely the case with Joshua and Caleb when the 
plague fell on the other spies, unbelieving, and on their adherents 
(Num. 14 : 36-38). 



386 



PSALM XCI. 



9. Because thou hast made the Lord, which is my 
refuge, even the Most High, thy habitation ; 

10. There shall no evil befall thee, neither shall any 
plague come nigh thy dwelling. 

Noticeably the word for " habitation " in v. 9, is the same which 
stands in the foreground of Ps. 90, there translated " dwelling- 
place." Because thou hast made the Lord thy dwelling-place, thy 
home, thy shelter, thy supreme trust. So Joshua and Caleb had 
done, and on this ground they said, It matters not how tall those 
giants of Canaan or how lofty and strong their walled cities ; God 
can give them into our hands with infinite ease ! Because they 
had such faith and so fully honored God by it before the nation, 
therefore no evil befell them ; no plague touched their dwelling. 
So evermore with those who thus honor the Lord by a living faith. 

11. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep 
thee in all thy ways. 

12. They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou 
dash thy foot against a stone. 

God has angels to send, ever ready and equal to any emergency. 
Is any agency required which calls for some power outside of the 
course of nature and competent to counteract its laws? Angelic 
hands are in readiness. They can bear thee up that thou stumble 
not, nor trip thy foot against a stone. The simplest possible so- 
lution is«here of the problem: How can God bring about events 
in opposition to natural causes, e. g., let a man, falling over a 
precipice, come down unhurt? " The angels shall bear thee up in 
their hands." What hinders? Do they not " excel in strength?" 
Does not the Bible attribute precisely this physical force to angelic 
agencies, e. g., rolling the great stone from the sepulcher (Matt. 
28 : 2) ? See also Dan. 10 : 10. Who knows but their power may 
extend to malaria as well as to rolling heavy stones ? (See 2 Sam. 
24 ; 16, 17, and 1 Chron. 21 ; 15, and Isa. 36 : 3&9 Of one thing 
we may be very sure — that he who promises to protect his people 
is not likely to be short of agencies for the purpose. 

13. Thou shalt tread upon the lion and adder : the 
young lion and the dragon shalt thou trample under feet. 

While the forms of evil mentioned here and elsewhere in this 
Psalm can not be held to prove absolutely that the writer was in 
the Arabian wilderness and familiar therefore by his very sur- 
roundings with wilderness life and dangers, yet it must be 
admitted that if he had lived and written there, he could scarcely 
have taken more of his illustrative cases from that life than he has 
done. The poisonous serpent will be remembered as among the 
destroyers of the people there (Num. 21 : 6-9). 

14. Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will 



PSALM XCII. 



387 



I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath 
known my name. 

15. He shall call upon me, and I will answer him : I 
will be with him in trouble ; I will deliver him, and honour 
him. 

16. With long life will I satisfy him, and show him my 
salvation. 

This sums up the great doctrine of the Psalm. "Set his love 

upon me," attached and bound himself to me in strongest, purest 
affection ; therefore, I will not tear him away but will deliver him 
from all danger. ''Because he hath known my name," not with 
merely intellectual notions, but with knowledge working itself out 

in love. " Will honor him," distinguish him from others by my 

special favor. " I will satisfy him with long life," give him all his 

heart craves ; fill his largest desires. Thus there is an offset to 

the mournfulness of human frailty and swift mortality. It shall 
be well with those that fear God and walk softly before him. 
Usually they have longer lives and more earthly blessings even in 
our age and in every age than the defiantly wicked. But even if 
their Jives should be short in years, they are long in blessings and 
rich in what yields the real fruits of earthly existence — usefulness 
to others, and a soul cultured on earth for the purity and the rest 
of heaven. 

*O>@400 * 

PSALM XCII. 

This Psalm appears with no clew to its author and has no defi- 
nite historic allusions to indicate its date or occasion. It is simply 
" A Psalm or Song for the Sabbath day "—a statement with which 
its contents entirely correspond. Its adaptations for Sabbath wor- 
ship as in the olden time are perfect. Its place assigned by the 

compilers, in Book IV, suggests the date, say of Josiah's reforma- 
tion, when it became practically a great national object and aim to 
draw the people to the temple and interest them in sacred worship 
on the holy day. The leading thoughts of this Psalm — the wicked 
flourishing for a day, soon to perish ; the righteous flourishing like 
the palm-tree, through long centuries, fruitful even in old age like 
Moses, Caleb, Joshua — are so fully in harmony with the two 
Psalms next preceding as to leave no room to question why it was 
located contiguous to those. 

1. It is a good thing to give thanks unto the Lord, and 
to sing praises unto thy name, O Most High : 

2. To show forth thy loving-kindness in the morning, and 
thy faithfulness every night, 



388 



PSALM XCII. 



3. Upon an instrument of ten strings, and upon the psal- 
tery ; upon the harp with a solemn sound. 

" Good is it to give thanks to the Lord " — good in the sense of 
being appropriate, due to God, and also blessed to the worshiper. 
Expanding the idea, God should be praised as being the Most 
High and only God, and as perpetually manifesting his loving- 
kindness and faithfulness to his people. Let him be honored -with 
fresh songs each morning, "with new praises every night. Let in- 
struments of music help to swell the song and inspire the souls of the 
Avorshipers, even a lyre of ten strings; a harp also with its sweetly 
murmuring tones. Curiously the Hebrew word for " a solemn 
sound " — which however properly means either a meditation, or a 
gentle soft tone — is constructed here as if it were itself an instru- 
ment, and the volume of praise were borne up upon it as upon the 
ten-stringed lyre. 

4. For thou, Lord, hast made me glad through thy 
work : I will triumph in the works of thy hands. 

5. O Lord, how great are thy works ! and thy thoughts 
are very deep. 

The context shows sufficiently that the " works " thought of here 
are. not primarily those of creation, but those of providence — the 
divine agencies in controlling human life — rewarding and punish- 
ing the well or ill doing of men. It is of these that the Psalmist 
exclaims : " How great are thy works ; how very deep are thy 
thoughts " — thoughts in the sense of counsels, plans, principles of 
moral government. The Psalmist is in most profound sympa- 
thy with God in these works of his, for he cries out, " Thou, Lord, 
hast gladdened me by these works of thine;" 1 will shout aloud 
for joy because of these works of thy hand. How blessed to be in 
such sympathy with the great God and with ways so good and so 
glorious; how precious withal to consecrate our earthly Sabbaths 
to these most appropriate meditations and joyous praises ! 

6. A brutish man knoweth not ; neither doth a fool under- 
stand this. 

7. When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all 
the workers of iniquity do flourish ; it is that they shall be 
destroyed forever : 

Expressively he wrote: "The man-brule will not know- the fool 
will not understand this," viz., that when the wicked spring up 
with rapid and apparently vigorous growth as the summer flowers 
in Palestine, it is that they may ripen soon for a swift destruction. 

The man-brute precisely translates the Hebrew words; one 

whom God has endowed with manhood, but who has debased him- 
self to brutehood; a man as being of God's creation in his own 
image, but a brute as being self-molded (shall we say self-made ?) 
into the image of the baser animals ! 



PSALM XCIL 



389 



8. But thou, Lord, art most high for evermore. 

9. For, lo, thine enemies, O Lord, for, lo, thine enemies 
shall perish ; all the workers of iniquity shall be scattered. 

The retributions demanded of a righteous God upon such wicked- 
ness and beastliness suggest the next thought; " Thou, O Lord, art 
most high for evermore ! " How well for a universe into which 
such sin has forced its way, that God is great, and that he can 
easily destroy his enemies and scatter their mightiest forces ! Look 
at this ; " lo," contemplate this everlasting truth ; the enemies of God 
shall perish ! 

10. But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of a uni- 
corn : I shall be anointed with fresh oil. 

11. Mine eye also shall see my desire on mine enemies, and 
mine ears shall hear my desire of the wicked that rise up 
against me. 

The speaker who says "my horn," "I shall be anointed," 
seems to be himself a king, perhaps Josiah, reigning under the 
God of Israel, anointed by his priests, and his horn [power] 
being lifted high by God's special favor, he expects to see his 

desire upon his enemies because they are also God's enemies. 

The "unicorn," by consent of modern critics, gives place to the 
oriental buffalo or wild ox — well known in ancient Palestine and 
'Arabia. Job (39 : 9, 10) gives a bold view of his untamed fierce- 
ness ; and David (Ps. 22 : 22) makes him a symbol for fierce and 

powerful enemies. The Italic word " desire*' twice used, may 

be omitted : " Mine eye shall look on mine enemies ; mine ear 
shall hear of the wicked men who rise against me; " i. e., shall see 
and hear their doom — which though not definitely expressed is yet 
fully implied. 

12. The righteous shall flourish like the palm-tree: he 
shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon. 

13. Those that he planted in the house of the Lord shall 
flourish in the courts of our God. 

14. They shall still bring forth fruit in old age : they shall 
be fat and flourishing ; 

15. To show that the Lord is upright : he is my rock, and 
there is no unrighteousness in him. 

The palm-tree is the glory of Palestine, magnificently tall and 
beautiful, and all its parts made useful to meet human -wants. So 
the cedars of Lebanon are unsurpassed in grandeur. The figure 
which compares the righteous to the palm* and the cedar is still 
heightened by supposing them to be planted in the house of the 
Lord and to nourish in the courts of his temple. Their character — 
all that which makes them righteous men and not wicked ; good 
men and°wise rather than sensual, brutish, foolish; finds its root 



390 



PSALM XCIII. 



and life-power in the household of the Lord where God reveals his 
love and makes known his name and breathes his own purity into 
the souls of his sincere and humble worshipers. These are the 
great truths so beautifully clothed with oriental imagery in our 
passage. Such men survive to a ripe old age, fruitful all the way, 
living witnesses that the Lord, the Jehovah who keeps covenant 
with his people, is upright, the rock of support to his trustful 
children, in whom moreover there never can be the least iniquity — 
never a shade of unrighteousness. 

PSALM XCIII. 

This short Psalm is left by the compilers without a word as to 
its author or occasion. Its leading thought — the majesty and glory 
of Jehovah's reign over his creatures — is remarkably in harmony 
with the strain of the Psalm preceding, and leaves us therefore in 

no doubt why the compilers placed it here. The thought of 

the Psalm is at once simple and sublime. " The Lord reigneth," 
all glorious, with all power ; has reigned through all the ages of 
the past, rising infinitely above all opposing forces, and finally 
crowning all his glorious natural attributes with the highest moral 
perfections — truth and purity. 

1. The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty ; the 
Lord is clothed with strength, whereivith he hath girded him- 
self: the world also is established, that it can not be moved. 

The middle clause might well be read — " The Lord is clothed 
with strength ; he girds it about him" — with allusion to the girding 
of one's loins to prepare for the fullest and freest exertion of 
strength. " The world is established" — but the Hebrew term sug- 
gests the world as inhabited, peopled ; and not the material globe 
itself. The reigning of God, which is in the foreground of this 
Psalm, is not so much the ordering of the material world as the 
ruling of nations and of individual men. 

2. Thy throne is established of old ; thou art from ever- 
lasting. 

" From of old " is essentially equivalent to from eternity. Thy 
throne has always stood ; it had no predecessor. No human 
thought can reach a point for its commencement. Thou thyself 
art from everlasting, and thy throne is no less ancient than thyself. 

3. The floods have lifted up, O Lord, the floods have 
lifted up their voice ; the floods lift up their waves. 

4. The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many 
waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea. 



PSALM XCIV. 



301 



Exegetically the main question on these words lies between the 
literal sense and the figurative ; i. e. f whether " floods " and " their 
voice " mean the very waters of the earth, rushing in mighty 
rivers, dashing in the great breakers of the sea, or rather repre- 
sent figuratively the uprising of the great forces of God's 
enemies. I incline to meet this question by saying, The former 
is the sense primarily; the latter, by implication. Because God 
is mightier than the rushing floods of Niagara, more grand than 
the. breakers of old ocean in a storm, therefore he is also infinitely 

above the puny wrath of the fiercest and most malign of mortals. 

In v. 4 the order and construction of the Hebrew words might be put 
thus : " Far above the roar of the great waters, the magnificent 
[waters], the breakers of the sea, is Jehovah glorious on high." 

5. Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh 
thine house, O Lord, forever. 

By a most beautiful transition, the Psalmist passes from the 
physical qualities of the Almighty to those moral perfections which 
are the true and highest glory of his nature — the sublimest gran- 
deur of his throne. "Thy testimonies are faithful, very faithful;" 
the witness thou hast given to men of thy will and of thy love is 

forever reliable and sure. " Holiness becometh thine house " — ■ 

the Hebrew word [" becometh "] combining, as in Ps. 33 : 1, the two 
ideas of beauty and fitness, expressing therefore the beauty of fit- 
ness. Holiness, moral purity, exemption from all sin, is appro- 
priate and exquisitely beautiful in thine house — the place of thine 
earthly abode, where thy worshiping people meet thee face to 
face. Let them appear there before this faithful and glorious 
God with clean hands and pure heart, in the beauty of holiness* 

PSALM XCIV. 

In our attempt to locate this Psalm in history, we have no data 
except, (1) The place which the compilers gave it, i. e., in Book IV 
and among Psalms many at least of which seem to fit the age from 
Manasseh to the captivity ; and (2) The contents of the Psalm 
itself. The burden of the Psalm is complaint against abounding 
iniquity, and especially against the abuse of law and government 
by wicked rulers. The main question of the Psalm is whether 
this wicked administration of law is in foreign or in domestic 
hands, i. e., whether the nation was suffering under a foreign 
yoke, or under the iniquitous rule of their own sovereigns. Critics 
differ widely as to the time and occasion of this writing, and per- 
haps we must say there is room for honest difference. I incline 
strongly to the opinion that the crying evils referred to were 
domestic rather than foreign, and that the Psalm contemplates 
the state of society under Manasseh and Amon, or more probably, 
under those godless sons of the good Josiah whose horrible in- 



392 



PSALM XCIV. 



iquities appear in the prophets of that age, e. g., Zephaniah, 
Ezekiel, and especially Jeremiah. To some extent the reasons for 
this opinion will naturally appear as we proceed in the Psalm. 

1. O Lord God, to whom vengeance belongeth ; O God, 
to whom vengeance belongeth, show thyself. 

2. Lift up thyself, thou Judge of the earth : render a 
reward to the proud. 

The most literal construction possible is full of force : " 0 God 
of revenges, Jehovah ; God of revenges, shine forth." u Shine 
forth," i. e., in manifestations of thy righteous indignation against 
wrong-doing, and especially against wicked ruling. " Lift up thy- 
self" — assert thy power and right to call these wicked men to 
account, for thou art the Supreme Judge of all the earth and 
especially of this land of Israel. Therefore bring retribution upon 
the proud — men high in power, but lifted up in heart and recog- 
nizing no God above them. 

3. Lord, how long shall the wicked, how long shall the 
wicked triumph? 

4. Sow long shall they utter and speak hard things ? and 
all the workers of iniquity boast themselves ? 

This language does not of itself prove that the wicked men com- 
plained of were civil rulers, but the verses next following show it. 
These questions are the imploring cry of one outraged by such 

iniquity. " Utter " — belch forth. " Hard things " — perversions 

of justice ; intensely, recklessly iniquitous. " Boast themselves " — 
literally, put themselves on high, bear themselves proudly, im- 
periously. 

5. They break in pieces thy people, 0 Lord, and afflict 
thine heritage. 

6. They slay the widow and the stranger, and murder the 
fatherless. 

If we remember that those last wicked kings of Judah were at 
once recklessly unjust and oppressive, and also thoroughly idol- 
atrous, and therefore hearty persecutors of all the truly good, we 

shall readily understand these verses. The appeal to the God 

of Israel was full of force : How long shall these men hold power 
on the throne Thou hast set up over thy people, and murder those 
defenseless ones whom Thou hast made law and government to 
protect ? 

7. Yet they say, the Lord shall not see, neither shall the 
God of Jacob regard it. 

Yet with most amazing fatuity they say, Jehovah will not see ; the 
God of Jacob, though pledged to be their Protector and Father, 
will not take notice ! These words are not the thing to put into 
the mouth of the Chaldeans during or after the captivity, nor of 



PSALM XCIV. 



393 



the Syrian Antiochus to whom some critics have referred them. 
They much more naturally set forth the moral blindness of Jewish 
kings, fearfully apostate from their nation 1 s God. 

8. Understand, ye brutish among the people : and ye fools, 
when will ye be wise ? 

9. He that planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that 
formed the eye, shall he not see ? 

10. He that chastiseth the heathen, shall not he correct ? 
he that teacheth man knowledge, shall not he know t 

Ye brutish ones, living among God's people, with light enough 

before your eyes, yet too self-blind, too madly wicked, to see ! 

The Psalmist would reason a little with them. Shall he who made 
man's ear have no ear, no sense of hearing, for himself? He that 
formed the wonderful human eye, has he no eye of his own to see 
your guilt and folly? He that chastiseth the guilty heathen, can 
he fail to chasten the men who hold power under himself over his 
own people ? Kemarkably in the last clause of v. 10, the question 
stops midway, the point of application being too obvious to need 
mention: " He that teacheth man all his knowledge" — [Fill out 
the rest yourselves : think, What then ?] 

11. The Lord knoweth the thoughts of men, that they 
are vanity. 

Which is- here said to be vanity; man's thoughts, or man him- 
self ? Either would be true. In favor of supposing the antecedent 
to be "man" is urged (a) That "man" here really means "men," 
all the wicked; (b). That the gender of the pronoun ["they"] 
is masculine, corresponding therefore to " man " and not to 
"thoughts" which is feminine; and (c) That the very words used 

here, "man is vanity," appear in Ps. 39: 5, 11. But over against 

these considerations is this one of great force — that the very thing 
before the mind is the brutish, senseless thoughts of wicked men 
who think of God as having no eye, no ear, no knowledge of 
man. Must not God know that such thoughts are one unutterable 
vanity ? 

32. Blessed is the man whom thou chastenest, O Lord, 
and teachest him out of thy law ; 

13. That thou mayest give him rest from the clays of ad- 
versity, until the pit be digged for the wicked. 

Suddenly the course of thought changes. Such outrageous 
wickedness and persecution of the good has some indirect benefits. 
It may be turned to some account as discipline for the pious suf- 
ferer. " Blessed is the man, O Lord, whom thou chastenest, and 
at the same time teachest him out of thy law" — sustaining his 
heart by thy precious truth, and giving him hope for the latter end. 

14. For the Lord will not cast off his people, neither 
will he forsake his inheritance. 



394 



PSALM XCIV. 



Certainly the Lord will not cast off his people. It may some- 
times seem that he has done so ; it might have seemed so to the 
good and faithful men who, like Jeremiah, breasted the horrid 
wickedness of Jehoiakim's reign, and had well-nigh sunk beneath 
it as Urijah (Jer. 26 : 20-23) did. 

15. But judgment shall return unto righteousness: and 
all the upright in heart shall follow it. 

"Judgment," in the precise sense of law as administered — the 
decisions of kings and courts ; these shall come back to intrinsic 
justice. All the upright of heart shall be in sympathy with such 
justice and shall rejoice to follow it 

16. "Who will rise up for me against the evil doers ? or 
who will stand up for me against the workers of iniquity? 

17. Unless the Lord had been my help, my soul had 
almost dwelt in silence. 

The pious author seemed to stand almost alone. If the Lord 
had not been at hand to help, my soul had soon [better than 
"almost"] been in the dwelling-place of the dead — this being 
obviously the sense of the word " silence " — the perpetual silence 
of death. 

18. When I said, My foot slippeth ; thy mercy, O Loed, 
held me up. 

19. In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy com- 
forts delight my soul. 

" What time I said " [might say], 11 my foot slippeth, thy mercy, 
O Jehovah, held me up," and always will. The last verb being 
future affirms his assurance of help for all time as well as his 

sense of help for that time. " In the multitude of my anxious 

thoughts, solicitudes, thy comforts were soothing and joyous to my 
soul." 

20. Shall the throne of iniquity have fellowship with 
thee, which frameth mischief by a law ? 

"The throne of iniquity" — a throne wickedly filled, perverted 
to purposes of wrong. "Framing mischief" into law — giving 
mischief the sanction of law, and so making it far more fearful. 
Shall such a throne associate itself with Thee — find a Friend and 
Supporter in Thee — think to have thy sympathy and help ? How 
repulsive and horrible the thought ! Will the holy and righteous 
God lend himself to sustain such legalized iniquity ? Will he 
throw a loving arm around such wicked rulers and comfort their 
hearts with his smiles ? 

21. They gather themselves together against the soul of 
the righteous, and condemn the innocent blood. 



PSALM XCV. 



395 



They — those wicked rulers — come down in hostile troops upon 
the souls of the righteous, or, as some critics prefer, they decide 
against all righteous men. The latter sense makes a more exact 
parallelism with the last clause : " they condemn innocent blood. 
In either construction, the verse expands the thought of the throne 
of iniquity, framing mischief into law. Can God approve or even 
endure such ruling ? 

22. But the Lord is my defense ; and my God is the 
rock of my refuge. 

23. And he shall bring upon them their own iniquity, 
and shall cut them off in their ow T n wickedness ; yea, the 
Lord our God shall cut them off. 

The Lord, so intensely loving righteousness, so thoroughly hating 
iniquity, shall be my defense and refuge ; and I surely know he 
will requite, nay more, will cut off the wicked who pervert their 
power wholly to purposes of outrageous wrong. 

PSALM XCV. 

We are here in the midst of Psalms (91-100), ten in succession, 
which the compilers arranged as we have them, but with no hint 
as to their author or occasion. The question as to the time of 
compilation is a choice between the age of Jeremiah and the age 
of Ezra and Kehemiah, with thus far a preponderance in favor of 
the former. Very manifestly Book V (Ps 107-150) belongs to the 
latter age — which fact is a point in favor of locating Book IV at 

the former period. Obviously the date of all these Psalms turns 

very much upon the time when they were compiled into Book IV, 
and the decision of this question requires a careful examination 

of each Psalm of the seventeen (90-106) which make it up. 

Some have supposed that the allusion to Ps. 95, in Heb. 4 : 7 
["saying in David"] proves that this Psalm was ascribed to him. 
But this seems rather to be a reference to the Psalter entire, as 
we speak of the " Psalms of David," without by any means imply- 
ing that he wrote them all. The Psalm before us witnesses for 

itself that it was written by some earnestly pious man in a time 
of religious revival. He summons the people [Jews especially] to 
worship their own Great and Glorious God — the Maker and Lord 
of all, and the covenant God, Protector and Friend of their nation, 
solemnly admonishing them against such unbelief and rebellion 
as that of their fathers in the wilderness, which incurred the dis- 
pleasure and even abhorrence of their God, and shut them out of 
Canaan. The revival in Josiah's time meets all the conditions of 
the Psalm as to the time when it was written and first brought 
into use in public worship. 



396 PSALM XCV. 

1. O come, let us sing unto the Lord; let us make a 
joyful noise unto the Rock of our salvation. 

2. Let us come before his presence with thanksgiving, 
and make a joyful noise unto him with psalms. 

As said above (Ps. 33: 3, and 66: 1, and 81 : 1), the word 
"noise " suggests to our modern ears some unpleasant associations, 
of which we must presume it was innocent when introduced by 
our translators. This "joyful noise" is the joyous shout of the 
outpoured song and glad acclaim of a thousand voices lifted in 
praise and adoration with Psalms and thanksgiving. 

3. For the Lord is a great God, and a great King 
above all gods. 

4. In his hand are the deep places of the earth : the 
strength of the hills is his also. 

5. The sea is his, and he made it : and his hands formed 
the dry land. 

Not without reason, for the Lord, our Jehovah, is a Great God 
and a great and universal King. Think how his hand upholds the 
deep places of the earth, where the miners dig into its bowels for 
the precious things thereof. Also the "strength" — better, the 
heights or summits of the mountains are his also. The Psalmist 
names the lowest known localities and the highest, to give definite- 
ness to the conception that God holds all alike in his great hand. 
"The sea and the dry land" — another comprehensive grouping 
to signify all there is of the earth's surface. Honor ye the glori- 
ous Maker of all ! 

6. O come, let us worship and bow down : let us kneel 
before the Lord our maker. 

7. For he is our God ; and we are the people of his 
pasture, and the sheep of his hand. To-day if ye will hear 
his voice, 

The call to most devout and humble worship is enforced by the 
special consideration : " he is our God, yea, our shepherd, who 

both shields us from danger and feeds us in green pastures. 

The Hebrew punctuation corresponds to the division of verses in 
our English Bible, but not to the English punctuation. Following 
the Hebrew arrangement, v. 7 would read: "We are the people 
of his pasture, and the sheep of his hand, even this day if ye will 
hear his voice." That is, ye of this generation have this blessed 
privilege if ye will. 

8. Harden not your heart, as in the provocation, and as 
in the day of temptation in the wilderness : 

9. When your fathers tempted me, proved me, and saw 
my work. 



PSALM XCV. 



397 



The special point of the exhortation is : Do not make your heart 
hard by resisting this kind and earnest appeal. God speaks in love ; 
do not repel his kindness and deaden your own moral sensibilities 

to the ruin of your souls. The example of their fathers in the 

wilderness is brought before them to augment the force of this 
appeal. The Hebrew words suggest these historical allusions, 
and it were better that our English version should do the same, 
thus : " Harden not your heart as at Meribah, as in the day of 
Massah in the wilderness." (See Ex. 17: 1-7). These names 
were significant, Meribah meaning strife ; Massah, temptation, with 
reference to their trying and proving God as if to see how much 

abuse he would bear. "Saw my works;" but the Hebrew 

makes this slightly emphatic: " also they saw my works," i e., 
my miracles. The sense seems to be, that although they had seen 
most striking miracles and were then living by miracle, they could 
yet tempt and abuse their own divine Benefactor and withold from 
him their heart's confidence and love. 

10. Forty years long was I grieved with this generation, 
and said, It is a people that do err in their heart, and they 
have not known my way : 

11. Unto whom I sware in my wrath that they should 
not enter into my rest. 

"Forty years long," i. e., throughout their entire wilderness 

life from Egypt to Canaan. "Grieved" — the verb suggesting, 

however, the feeling of disgust, loathing. "I said, a people 

wanderers in heart are they " — the words being an allusion to 
their wandering over the wilderness. That is, they are not only 
wanderers over barren hills and dreary wastes, but worse yet, 
wanderers in heart from truth and duty, from their greatest, best 

Friend, the God of their broken covenant. " They have not 

known my wuys" — not that they have had no means of knowing, 
but that they had no heart to know. So far as " they knew God 
they glorified him not as God," and therefore became only the 
more lost to virtue and alien from God. Hence God sware in his 
wrath that that generation should never enter Canaan, their prom- 
ised land of rest. "Enter into my rest," refers here to the solemn 
oath of God, recorded Num. 14 : 22, 23, 28-32. The mass of the 
people sinned so unreasonably, against so much light, in the pres- 
ence of mercies so rich and miracles so great, the Lord could not 
endure them, and therefore for his own honor, and for a warning 
against like unbelief and sin, must, by his solemn oath, debar this 
whole generation from their promised Canaan. Such sin, against 
such light and such mercy, persisted in, must in every age and in 
our own, shut men out of heaven. 



398 



PSALM XCVI. 



PSALM XCVI. 

In this Psalm the summons to sing the high praises of Jehovah 
goes out not to Jews alone but to Gentiles also, even to all the 
nations of the whole earth. In this one respect it is an advance 
upon Ps. 95 which addresses itself specially to Jews. The strain 
of this beautiful Psalm is eminently simple, yet grandly sublime. 
Come and join with all your heart in the worship of the Great God 
who built the heavens. High is he above all other gods : honor and 
majesty invest him round about: ascribe to him the glory due to 
his name ; come into his courts with your thank-offerings and wor- 
ship him most reverently, for he is the Great King, and he cometh 
to judge the world in righteousness. 

1. O Sing unto the Lord a new song : sing unto the 
Lord, all the earth. 

" A new song," unknown to you before. Come, all ye nations of 
the wide earth, who, up to this hour, have been giving your wor- 
ship to dead gods that were no gods at all ; come and give your 
hearts to the true and only God in this new song ! 

2. Sing unto the Lord, bless his name ; show forth his 
salvation from day to day. 

3. Declare his glory among the heathen, his wonders 
among all people. 

"Show forth his salvation" — the verb "show forth" being that 
which Isaiah has made sacred to the idea of preaching the Gospel, 

proclaiming its. glad tidings. (Isa. 40 : 9, and 52 : 7.) " Declare 

his glory" . . . "his wonders," etc. — tell all the heathen world 
how good and glorious is the Lord our God, and what wonders of 
loving-kindness he hath wrought. It will be glad news to them ! 

The reader should not fail to notice that this Psalm has not 

only the choice words but the very spirit of Isaiah, so that we may 
infer with great probability that it was written after (perhaps soon 
after) the prophecies of Isaiah had made their mark on the relig- 
ious mind of the nation. 

4. For the Lord is great, and greatly .to be praised ; he 
is to be feared above all gods. 

5. For all the gods of the nations are idols : but the Lord 
made the heavens. 

Remarkably here as usually in the scriptures, the decisive test 
of true divinity, distinguishing the true God from all false gods, is 
his creatorship. Your heathen gods are mere nothings (the sense 
of the Hebrew word for " idols "), but Jehovah, our God, built the 
heavens. (Compare Ps. 95 : 5, and Jer. 10: 11, 12, 16). Ought he 
not then to be feared and worshiped, high above all gods ? 



PSALM XCVI. 



399 



6. Honor and majesty are before him : strength and 
beauty are in his sanctuary. 

"Honor and majesty are before him" — in the sense of being 
always and every-where present where he is ; indeed the very out- 
going manifestations of his presence ; the witness of a present 

God. " Strength and beauty " are in like manner revealed in 

his holy place where he dwells for the purpose of revealing him- 
self to his people. 

7. Give unto the Lord, O ye kindreds of the people, 
give unto the Lord glory and strength. 

8. Give unto the Lord the glory due unto his name : 
bring an offering, and come into his courts. 

As in Ps. 29, " Give " has the sense, not of impart, but of ascribe. 
Recognize him as having glory and strength : award him due honor 

for these divine qualities. "Bring an offering' 1 — one of the 

Hebrew ritual terms for a thank-offering of bloodless sort. Come, 
all ye of the Gentile world ; enter the courts of our own Supreme 
God with your grateful thank-offerings and your humble adora- 
tions. 

9. O worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness : fear 
before him, all the earth. 

"In the beauty of holiness " — a phrase which I would not [with 
Gesenius] restrict to priestly garments ; " but, rising high above 
such ritualistic notions, would find in it a call to offer worship to 
the pure and holy One with pure and holy heart, in honest sin- 
cerity. Such simple hearted sincerity is beauty in his sight — the 
" beauty of holiness." 

10. Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth : the 
world also shall be established that it shall not be moved : 
he shall judge the people righteously. 

Exegetically the main question in this and the contiguous 
Psalms respects the nature of this reigning and judging. Is it of 
this world, and if so, of nature, or of providence, or of both ? Or is 
it at the end of this world, the final and great judgment day, in- 
cluding naturally the retributions of the eternal world as well? 
The true answer must harmonize with the genius of the Old Testa- 
ment age, viz., retribution and in general the divine ruling mani- 
fested largely in the present life, yet designed to be the pledge, the 
guaranty, and the illustration of the retributions of the eternal 
world. Giving due scope to this comprehensive idea, I answer the 
main question above made by saying — primarily of this world, but 
suggestively, prophetically, of the world to come. First, here ; 
ultimately, there. Ruling and judging among both nations and 
men in time, foreshadowing the greater and more perfect ruling 
and judging of all moral beings, yet to be, when no blending of 



400 



PSALM XCVIL 



discipline and probation will modify or in any measure obscure the 

Serfect development of justice and judgment according to deeds and 
eserts. 

11. Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth be glad; 
let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof. 

12. Let the fields be joyful, and all that is therein : then 
shall all the trees of the wood rejoice 

13. Before the Lord : for he cometh, for he cometh to 
judge the earth: he shall judge the w T orld with righteous- 
ness, and the people with his truth. 

Let all above and all below rejoice with gladness in the near 
development of God's reign on earth; and no less in the more 
remote development of his final judgment and eternal reign of 
righteousness. But first is that which is nearest and of time. As 
God proceeds to make his name and gospel more fully known on 
earth, with this advance of knowledge goes also a more full develop- 
ment of himself as Supreme Ruler and Judge. Making himself 

more known in these relations he should be more heartily and 
reverently adored. Let the universe of intelligent beings, and 
indeed, through sympathy, the sea and all that fills it; the fields 
and all they contain and the trees of the wood as well — unite in 
exulting praise and gladness before the mighty Lord because he 
ruleth in righteousness and will bring down and bring under the 
cruel wrongs of sin and the very spirit of sinning — all that makes 
earth groan and heaven weep; all the mass of earthly woe begotten 
of sin and running riot over the world's peace till God comes forth 
to rule and judge the world in righteousness. 

PSALM XCVII. 

This Psalm takes up the theme with which the previous one 
closed: "The Lord rcigneth," and gives it (we might say in 
musical phrase) "with variations." Here as there it is a jo} r ful 
theme (v. 1); it admits of some illustrations from the history of 
the past (vs. 3-6) ; its lessons bear impressively upon the wor- 
shipers of idols (v. 7); the real Zion has joy in God's reigning 
(v. 8). Let the righteous see their duty herein ; be assured of 
their reward; and joyously give thanks in the remembrance of 
his holiness. 

1. The Lord reigneth ; let the earth rejoice ; let the 
multitude of isles be glad thereof. 

"The multitude of isles," bears the mind to all remote lands of 
the earth lying beyond the sea. Isaiah has the same usage of the 
word "isles," and the same sentiment: Let them all rejoice in the 



PSALM XCVII. 



401 



one great and glorious God! (See 42: 10, 12). The Gentile 
nations are assumed to have good reason for joy that such a God 
reigns, the ground of this assumption being either that all 
intelligent beings ought to rejoice in the prevalence of righteous- 
ness, or that, prophetically, it was foreseen that the moral reign 
of God would yet become a source of unmeasured blessings to all 
lands and peoples of the wide earth. 

2. Clouds and darkness are round about him : righteous- 
ness and judgment are the habitation of his throne. 

If in revealing himself to mortals the invisible God should deem 
it wise to make some visible manifestations of his presence, it is 
quite obvious that they must be made under limitations. Care 
must be taken to secure a feeling of reverence and awe, and to 
avoid that disrespect which might result from too much familiarity. 
Hence, the human mind and heart being what they are, there 
arises, we might say, a natural necessity that "clouds and dark- 
ness should gather round about him." It should not surprise us 
that at Sinai, in the solemn announcement of his law, God should 
speak forth from the thick darkness — that cloud and tempest, 
thunder and lightning, and the quaking of that grand and awful 
mount, should impress the assembled people with fear and even 
awe and dread. So when the Lord prepared for himself a per- 
manent dwelling-place in the tabernacle and temple, he invested 
himself in " thick darkness." Eyes profanely curious were sternly 

barred off. To these facts our passage seems to have primary 

reference. Yet let it not be overlooked that a deeper meaning is 
here, suggested by these historic facts and beautifully illustrated 
thereby, viz., that the reasons of God's ways are often, perhaps 
usually, too deep for our human line to fathom. Our short vision 
can not penetrate their mystery. Clouds and darkness gather 
round about him; and yet he takes care to give us abundant 
reasons for believing that righteousness and judgment are the 
basis of his throne — the principles that forever control his 
decisions. Dr. Alexander pertinently remarks that " righteous- 
ness and judgment seem to be here related as the attribute and 
act." 

3. A fire goeth before him, and burnetii up his enemies 
round about. 

4. His lightnings enlightened the world : the earth saw, 
and trembled. 

5. The hills melted like wax at the presence of the 
Lord, at the presence of the Lord of the whole earth. 

In v. 3 the verbs are future, indicating not only what has been 
but what will be. The meaning of these verses I take to be that 
God has in former ages made such manifestations of his power 
toward his enemies as are here described poetically, and will, yet 
again, when the occasion demands. There may be some allusion 



402 



PSALM XCVII. 



to the scenes of Sinai, yet it seems more appropriate to compare 
the passage with Ps. 18: 7-14, and 50: 3, etc. The strain is 
most sublime poetry. 

6. The heavens declare his righteousness, and all the peo- 
ple see his glory. 

The heavens themselves are thought of as setting forth or pro- 
claiming what God himself proclaims and sets forth from his throne 
in the heavens. All the people of the earth are made to see his 
glory — in the sense of his wonderful and glorious manifestations. 

7. Confounded be all they that serve graven images, that 
boast themselves of idols : worship him, all ye gods. 

Let shame overwhelm all who serve idol gods. The word for 
"boast themselves " suggests that they make a vain display — pre- 
cisely a shine, of such worship, i. e., are proud of it. Instead of 
being thus proud, let them become intensely ashamed of such gods 

and of worshiping them. They ought to be ! " Worship him," 

[i. e., Jehovah] " all ye gods." The remarkable thing here is that 
whereas idol gods are usually named, described, and held to be 
mere nothings, nonentities, here they are thought of for the moment 
as real existences, and are exhorted to give to the one and only 

Great God the homage due to him. A notion that this view of 

idols is incongruous or inconsistent with the customary representa- 
tion, probably led the translators of the Septuagint to write : " Let 
all his angels worship him." This translation of the Septuagint 
was used by the writer to the Hebrews (1 : 6) — the words happily 
expressing the great fact that, at the Savior's birth, the angels 
came in songs of welcome and adoration (Luke 2 : 13, 14). 

8. Zion heard, and was glad; and the daughters of Ju- 
dah rejoiced because of thy judgments, O Lord. 

These words occur also in Ps. 48: 11. "Daughters of Ju- 

dah " — sometimes used for the suburban towns and villages, but 
more frequently for the very mothers, daughters, and sisters, with 
special allusion to the female voice in song, and perhaps also to 
the historic fact that damsels were prominent in the national songs 
on occasions of great victory. God's judgments on the wicked 
for the deliverance of the righteous and the support of intrinsic 
righteousness, are the ground of this rejoicing. 

9. For thou, Lord, art high above all the earth : thou 
art exalted far above all gods. 

That such a God, the Great Jehovah, is high above all the earth 
and all the wicked thereof, is here assigned as properly the ground 
and reason of this joy. O how infinitely above the empty and 
powerless gods of the heathen ! 

10. Ye that love the Lord, hate evil : he preserveth the 



PSALM XCVIII. 



403 



souls of his saints ; lie delivereth them out of the hand of 
the wicked. 

The one great moral lesson from these views of God and his 
throne is briefly put here: u Ye that love the Lord, hate evil." 
As God hates all sin and wrong, so should ye. No duty can be 
more imperative ; none more reasonable. Let the example of the 
great and holy God inspire in your souls most intense abhorrence 
of sin. He who preserves your souls and redeems you from the 
power of the wicked, does all in the love of righteousness and the 
hatred of sin ; therefore let this benevolence of your God prompt 
and inspire you to like love of others' well-being and abhorrence 
of all evil. 

11. Light is sown for the righteous, and gladness for the 
upright in heart. 

Light sown " — to produce a harvest of blessings, the best of 
" gladness." The figure is exquisitely beautiful. Light is one of 
the finest possible emblems of happiness. That it should be 
planted as a seed, is of course a poetic conception, yet at once 
clear in sense and beautiful in figure, surely foretokening a future 
product of good for the truly righteous. 

12. Rejoice in the Lord, ye righteous ; and give thanks 
at the remembrance of his holiness. 

Well indeed may all the righteous rejoice in the Lord who 
makes sure to them such a wealth of blessing. Let them espe- 
cially rejoice as they think of his holiness — his abhorrence of sin ; 
his glorious purity ; his supreme devotion to the highest interests 
of his moral universe. 

PSALM XCVIII. 

It is entirely obvious that this Psalm belongs to the group which 
commences with Psalm 93, and (omitting perhaps Ps. 94) closes 
with Ps. 100. With some variety, the general strain of thought, 
as well as cast of expression, is remarkably similar. With great 
probability they were all written by the same hand and of course 
in the same age. I assume that the Psalms of Book IV belong to 
the age between Manasseh and the last carrying away of captives 
to Babylon, and that this special group is an outgrowth of the re- 
vival under Josiah. Such revivals of the religious life and conse- 
quently of religious worship, would naturally bring out many new 
songs for public use, adapted to the times. 

1. O sing unto the Lord a new song ; for he hath done 
marvelous things: his right hand, and his holy arm, hath 
gotten him the victory. 



404 



PSALM XCVIII. 



2. The Lord hath made known his salvation : his 
righteousness hath he openly showed in the sight of the 
heathen. 

3. He hath remembered his mercy and his truth toward 
the house of Israel : all the ends of the earth have seen 
the salvation of our God. 

It is, perhaps, impossible to say how far back the mind of the 
writer travels into the historical past. Marvelous things, wrought 
of God, victories won, the salvation of his people displayed before 
all the earth, might have been found as far back as the age of 
Moses and Egypt, or in the age of David and his powerful enemies, 
or of Hezekiah and the proud Assyrian — the latter as being nearer, 
with much more probability. Those wonders were the grand man- 
ifestation of God s power to save in their own age. They thrilled 
the soul of Isaiah, and through him the souls of the pious in his 
and the subsequent age. It is quite pertinent here to notice the 
somewhat numerous points of striking similarity between this 
group of 'Psalms and the writings of Isaiah. Is it perhaps suppos- 
able that Isaiah himself wrote them ? If not, we must, I judge, 
concede that the writer had Isaiah before his mind, and drank in 
from him a measure of his sublime poetic and religious inspiration. 
Compare vs. 2, 3, of this Psalm, with Isa. 52: 10. "The Lord 
hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations, and all 
the ends of the earth shall see the salvation of our God." The 
spirit of missionary zeal and enterprise which reign in these 
Psalms is only the spirit of Isaiah re-produced in the next genera- 
tion of his readers and admirers. 

4. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all the earth ; 
make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise. 

5. Sing unto the Lord with the harp; with the harp, 
and the voice of a psalm. 

6. With trumpets and sound of cornet make a joyful 
noise before the Lord, the King. 

The Hebrew word for " make a loud noise," * properly, to break 
forth in loud shouts, is characteristic of Isaiah — used by him at 
least seven times, and not elsewhere in this sense except once 

here. The sentiment— sing the high praises of God with ever 

heightening appliances, with the use of all known instruments of 
music adapted to religious worship. 

7. Let the sea roar, and the fullness thereof; the world, 
and they that dwell therein. 

8. Let the floods clap their hands : let the hills be joyful 
together 

i 



PSALM XC1X. 



405 



9. Before the Lord ; for he cometh to judge the earth ; 
with righteousness shall he judge the world, aud the 
people with equity. 

Let all nature sympathize and swell the song — the sea and all 
that dwell therein, the world and all its vast populations. Then 
think of the floods clapping their hands with joy ! This figure also 
comes from Isaiah (55 : 12) who, however, applies it to the trees — 
" all the trees of the field shall clap their hands." The inspiring 
cause of this overflowing joy is that Jehovah is coming to judge the 
earth in righteousness and equity. Such judgments as those 
which crushed the proud Assyrian inspired this confidence. The 
words look primarily to similar manifestations of God's righteous 
judgment among the nations: remotely, to the final judgment of 
which these anterior manifestations are only the precursors and 
pledges. 

PSALM XCIX. 

Here obviously we have the same general course of thought as 
in the Psalms preceding, with some variations. 

1. The Lord reigneth ; let the people tremble: he sitteth 
between the cherubim ; let the earth be moved. 

2. The Lord is great in Zion ; and he is high above all 
the people. 

3. Let them praise thy great and terrible name ; for it is 
holy. 

"Tremble," to the extent of reverent awe. "Sitteth on" [or 

between] "the cherubims," with allusion to the location of the 
Shechinah, the visible manifestation of God's glory directly upon 
the mercy-seat, i. e., the lid of the ark, over which cherubic fig- 
ures spread their wings. The usual mode of expression is the 
same as here — sitting as if enthroned amid the cherubim; liter- 
ally, the sitter of the cherubim. (Compare 1 Sam. 4 : 4, and 2 Sam. 
6 : 2, and 2 Kings 19 : 15.) The words have some special im- 
portance here, as showing that the ark of the covenant was still in 
the sanctuary, and therefore that this Psalm was not written after 
the captivity — the ark never appearing in history after the exile 

to Babylon. "Let them praise thy great and fearful name," 

a name that should inspire profoundest reverence and awe ; " for 
it is holy." The word "holy," affirmed of the name of God and 
made strongly emphatic as here and in vs. 5, 9, seems to compre- 
hend all the divine perfections — (at least all the moral) — all that 
which makes Jehovah truly God, according to the original idea of 
the word ; that which is distinctively divine—which sets God apart 
entirely from all his creatures, lifting him indefinitely above them 
in every great and good quality of character. 
18 



406 



PSALM C. 



4. The king's strength also loveth judgment ; thou dost 
establish equity, thou executest judgment and righteousness 
in Jacob. 

5. Exalt ye the Lord our God, and worship at his foot- 
stool ; for he is holy. 

In the remarkable phrase, " The king's strength loveth justice," 
we may supply the verb of the verse previous, thus : Let them 
praise the strength of the king who loves justice ; or we may sup- 
pose the abstract used for the concrete — "the strength of the 
king" for the strong king, the Mighty One. It is a matter of pro- 
found joy that one so mighty loves justice and will execute it 
among the nations. 

6. Moses and Aaron among his priests, and Samuel 
among them that call" upon his name; they called upon the 
Lord, and he answered them. 

7. He spake unto them in the cloudy piUar : they kept 
his testimonies, and the ordinance that he gave them. 

The noblest men of their ancient history were men of prayer. 
They drew very near to God and God came down with most sig- 
nal revelations of himself to them. The fact seems to be intro- 
duced here for the moral power of its example. 

8. Thou answeredst them, O Lord our God: thou wast 
a God that forgavest them, though thou tookest vengeance 
of their inventions. 

Insensibly the discourse passes from those distinguished men 

here named to the people of their generation. "Inventions;" 

not at all in the modern sense — mechanical improvements — but of 
deeds wickedly devised by men alien from God. It is a striking 
fact that this Hebrew word, applied to God, bears always the good 
sense, but applied to man, always the bad sense of wicked de- 
vices, ways contrived in opposition to God, in defiance of his law. 

9. Exalt the Lord our God, and worship at his holy 
hill ; for the Lord our God is holy. 

Exalt Jehovah, our Great God : worship at the place of his ap- 
pointment. 

PSALM C. 

Comparing the several Psalms of this group with each other, we 
are struck with their general similarity, yet we may also detect 
shades of difference. Thus Ps. 97 gives more prominence to the 
glorious works of God ; Ps. 98 makes prominent the summons to 
praise because of those great works. In the same way, Ps. 99 



PSALM CI. 



407 



dwells largely on what God has done ; Ps. 100 simply calls on all 
to serve, worship, give thanks and praise. This fact evinces a 
designed relation between these successive Psalms — a perfectly 
natural and appropriate relation, moreover, for such a call to 
praise and thanksgiving has a natural basis in God's character 
and works. Nothing can be more fitting than that the call to 
praise should follow such a presentation of qualities that ought to 
be praised. God asks our love and praise, not on the basis of ar- 
bitrary power and right to command, but of his infinite merit, 
his intrinsic worthiness and the proofs thereof which he has given 
in lavish abundance. 

1. Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, all ye lands. 

2. Serve the Loed with gladness : come before his pres- 
ence with singing. 

"Serve the Lord" — a word less frequent than we should per- 
haps expect. It occurs Ps. 2: 11. It calls for obedience to his 
revealed will — the service due from subjects to their Great King. 
Let it be rendered not grudgingly, not with painful resistance, 
but with " gladness," which certainly implies a cheerful good will, 
a hearty love of his service above all other life. 

3. Know ye that the Lord he is God ; it is he that hath 
made us, and not we ourselves ; we are his people, and the 
sheep of his pasture. 

This sentiment has appeared in Ps. 95 : 7, and elsewhere — the 
high claims of God as our Creator, the fountain of our being and 
of all the good which existence involves. 

4. Enter into his gates with thanksgiving, and into his 
courts with praise : be thankful unto him, and bless his 
name. 

5. For the Lord is good ; his mercy is everlasting ; and 
his truth endureth to all generations. 

The summons to praise, in public, in his earthly courts, is 
based most appropriately on his goodness which no human words 
can adequately express ; on his everlasting mercy ; and on his 
truth, i. e. f faithfulness to his promises, which endureth age after 
age in unwaning strength, always reliable ; never failing. 



PSALM CI. . 

This jfsalni and also Ps. 103 are ascribed to David. Yet they 
stand here in Book IV. But at the close of Book II (Ps. 72 : 20) 
the compilers said — " The prayers of David the son of Jesse are 
ended " — a statement which would seem to imply that they supposed 
they had placed in the Psalter all the known Psalms of David. 



408 



PSALM CI. 



Yet Book III has one Psalm ascribed to David (Ps. 86) ; Book 
IV has two ; and Book V fifteen. These facts raise several ques- 
tions of interest, e. g., What dooe the subscription to Ps. 72 
mean and is it reliable ? In what sense are these eighteen Psalms 
the work of David which we find ascribed to him in Books III, IV, 

and V ? On this latter point some critics hold that they are 

David's only in the sense of being written by his royal de- 
scendants, e. g., Hezekiah, Josiah, Zerubbabel. Others hold the 
less objectionable view that the groundwork is David's, but modi- 
fied, adapted to the times, and adopted practically by some later 
hand. I accept this view as involving less difficulties than any 

other. As to the subscription to Ps. 72 we are relieved of some 

difficulties when we take the ground (manifestly tenable and just) 
that the compilers were not necessarily inspired and their remarks 
need not be vindicated as if they were part of the inspired record. 
Furthermore, the Psalms of David found in Books I and II may 
include all that were thoroughly finished and prepared for the 
public service of the sanctuary by himself. He may have left 
other songs unfinished which came to light subsequently and were 
prepared for public use by other hands and adopted into the later 
books of the Psalter. Or this may have been the case : Though 
finished productions of David and truly inspired, they were not 
called for in the sanctuary service until later ages and new events 
made for them a fitting place and they were adopted, as said 
above, by some other writer as expressing his experiences, and 

as demanded in the public worship of his times. Another 

important question closely related to these points is that of the 
time when these several books of the Psalter were compiled. 
Briefly stated, I have assumed that Book I. was compiled during 
the reign of David and probably near its close; Book II, not 
earlier than the reign of Jehoshaphat and probably not later than 
Hezekiah ; Book III, in like manner, not earlier than the time of 
Hezekiah and probably not much later; Book IV, near the be- 
ginning of the captivity — in the time of Jeremiah ; and Book V, 

in the age of Ezra and Nehemiah. The time of compiling Book 

IV calls for more particular notice here, it being a disputed ques- 
tion whether it was done in the age of Jeremiah or of Ezra. I 
favor the earlier date on these grounds : (1) If placed in the age 
of Ezra, no reason is apparent for making Book V at all. Why 
were not all the Psalms (90-150) put into one book? By this 
theory they should have been compiled by the same men and near 
the same time: why then make them two books instead of 
one? 

(2) Internal evidence, makes it probable that the group of kin- 
dred Psalms (93-100) was written during the age of Josiah. ^ The 
manifest influence of Isaiah's prophecies (probably a fresh influ- 
ence) and the reference to the ark and the cherubim (Ps. 99: 1) 
are points in this evidence. If written then, they were probably 
compiled during that age. 



PSALM CI. 



409 



(3) It is probable (a priori) that as the religious reformation 
under David brought into existence and into public use a body of 
religious odes ; as the corresponding reformation under Jehosha- 
phat brought out another accession of odes, which appear in Book 
II ; and the great revival under Hezekiah yet another which were 
collected into Book III ; so the last great revival preceding the 
exile, viz., that under Josiah, should produce another, such as 
Book IV. 

(4) These Psalms of Book IV are in every respect admirably 
adapted to the circumstances of that age. 

In accordance with the views above presented, we may suppose 
this Psalm to have been left among the unfinished or at least the 
uncompiled Psalms of David, but taken up in the age of Jeremiah — 
probably by King Josiah himself and brought forward as express- 
ing his noble purposes as to his religious life and regal responsi- 
bilities. It will be remembered that Josiah came to the throne at 
the age of eight years " and in the eighth year of his reign, while 
he was yet young, he began to seek after the God of David his 
father," and in the twelfth year (then at the age of twenty) he 
commenced his great public reformation (2 Chron. 34: 1-3). The 
entire tone of this Psalm is therefore admirably adapted to his 
ease. 

1. I will sing of mercy and judgment : unto thee, O Lord, 
will I sing. 

To sing unto God of mercy and of judgment would seem to mean — 
I will celebrate the mercies and the judgments of the Lord ; I will 
sing of them to his praise. But this does not naturally give the 
scope of this particular Psalm which is entirely occupied with his 
own purposes respecting his life and reign. Hence some have 
supposed that this v. 1. contemplates not specially the scope of 
this Psalm, but of Ps. 102 and 103; the former singing of judgment; 
the latter, of mercy. Perhaps so. If the words are to be under- 
stood of this Psalm only, it is not easy to determine to what 
precisely they refer. 

2. I will behave myself wisely in a perfect way. O when 
wilt thou come unto me ? I will walk within my house with 
a perfect heart. 

" 0 when wilt thou come unto me ? " involves the prayer — Grant 
me fresh manifestations of favor. Come near to me to dwell with 
me and to aid me in maintaining the life of devoted service to thee 
which I now solemnly purpose. 

3. I will set no wicked thing before mine eyes : I hate the 
work of them that turn aside ; it shall not cleave to me. 

I will not allow myself to look on any wickedness lest the sight 

of the eye should bring temptation to my soul. The last clause 

probably in this sense; I hate the doing of unrighteousness; it 



410 



PSALM CI. 



shall find no sympathy in me. My heart shall not cleave to it. I 
hate the doing, and [by implication] the spirit of apostasy from 
God. 

4. A froward heart shall depart from me : I will not 
know a wicked person. 

Not primarily-— I will thrust away the men of froward heart and 
have no intimacy with the wicked ; but I will put a froward heart 
away from myself; I will put frowardness, moral perverseness, 
from my own soul, and I will not knovj wickedness — "know" in 
the sense of approving sympathy. Thus understood, the verse 
speaks of self-culture rather than of the choice of associates and 

of relations to wicked men. The last Hebrew noun, translated 

" wicked person," should certainly mean wickedness itself. 

5. Whoso privily slandereth his neighbor, him will I cut 
off : him that hath a high look and a proud heart will not I 
suffer. 

Here the writer passes from speaking of self-culture to speak of 
his treatment of the wicked. " Privily slandereth " — literally, he 

that tongueth his neighbor secretly. "Will I not suffer," is 

properly, "him I can not 11 — i. e., can not live with, can not bear 
about me, as the same verb is used Isa. 1 : 13. 

6. Mine eyes shall he upon the faithful of the land, that 
they may dwell with me : he that walketh in a perfect way, 
lie shall serve me. 

7. He that worketh deceit shall not dwell within my 
house : he that telleth lies shall not tarry in my sight. 

I will look carefully for faithful and true men to fill responsible 
positions under me. Nobly said ! 

8. I will early destroy all the wicked of the land ; that 1 
may cut off all wicked doers from the city of the Lord. 

"Early," i. e., in the morning; but the sense is — In the very 
beginning of my reign. Remembering that Josiah succeeded at 
only a two years' interval the intensely wicked reign of Manasseh, 
a long reign moreover of fifty-five years, it is obvious that a thin- 
ning out, not to say a general cleaning out of bad men from high 
official positions, would be a first necessity to such a reformation 
as Josiah had resolved to effect. The same necessity existed to 
some extent though probably to a less extent in the case of David 
when he came to the throne. 



PSALM CIL 



411 



PSALM CII. 

In the caption to this Psalm (" A prayer of the afflicted when 
he is overwhelmed, and poureth out his complaint before the 
Lord") the case of the author is described but his name withheld. 
It is supposeable that the compiler was himself the author and for 
this reason suppressed his name. Or he meant to suggest that his 
way of relief when "overwhelmed" was good for any and every 
other "afflicted one," and any such one might fitly seek God for 

like relief. It was hinted in the introduction to Ps. 90, that not 

improbably Jeremiah compiled this Book IV. The same suggestion 
is in place here. He may have been of this Psalm both compiler 
and author. His sympathy with suffering Zion, his grief, his tears, 
and on the other hand his hope in God and his relief from God's 
promises and from his love were certainly the same in kind which 
we have here reproduced most perfectly. How far the affliction 
contemplated here was personal, e.g., from* sickness ; and how far 
public and religious — from sympathy with Zion in her affliction, it 
is impossible to determine absolutely — but the latter was present 
manifestly and in no inconsiderable force. It is the beauty and 
glory of this Psalm that this afflicted one manifests such sympathy 
and such identity of interest with the God of Zion that while God 
lives and loves, he can not lack a well-spring of joy even in the 
most dreary of earth's deserts. Flying to God and taking hold of 
his promises of good to Zion, his soul rises to grateful joy. 

1. Hear my prayer, O Lord, and let my cry come unto 
thee. 

2. Hide not thy face from me in the day when I am in 
trouble : incline thine ear unto me : in the day when I call 
answer me speedily. 

These are the outgoings of the Christian soul; the voice of the 
religious life: To whom shall I go in trouble but to my God? 

3. For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones 
are burned as a hearth. 

" Consumed like smoke " — would be better read — "pass away 

as hi smoke, as if they disappeared into smoke and ashes. 

"Burned as a hearth," is not a felicitous translation, for a 
" hearth " should be incombustible. Better — " burned as a faggot," 
as any fuel. The sentiment, My days waste away to nothing; turn 
to no good account; are lost. 

4. My heart is smitten, and withered like grass : so that 
I forget to eat my bread. 

5. By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave 
to my skin. 

"My heart smitten," its vital forces stricken down as grass is 



412 



PSALM CIL 



struck with the mower's scythe and then must wither. " Forget 

to eat " — literally forget so as not to eat. No promptings of appe- 
tite call me to my accustomed food. Sorrow has taken all appetite 

for food away. "By reason of the voice of my groaning" — but 

it is rather the grief than the outward expression of it that dries 
his flesh to his bones. This is a poet's delineation of intense 
grief. 

6. I am like a pelican of the wilderness : I am like an owl 
of the desert. 

7. I w r atch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house- 
top. 

These birds are chosen to represent his case because they fre- 
quent old ruins, the most desolate localities; and in the night. 
This afflicted one is a desolate dreary mourner, sleepless and 
lonely. 

8. Mine enemies reproach me all the day ; and they that 
are mad against me are sworn against me. 

The last clause better thus: My infuriated foes swear by me, 
i. e n imprecate curses on men by saying, Let them be as miser- 
able as he. Hebrew usage sustains this sense of swearing by 
another (See Isa. 65 : 15 and Jer. 29 : 22). 

9. For I have eaten ashes like bread, and mingled my 
drink with weeping, 

10. Because of thine indignation and thy w T rath : for thou 
hast lifted me up, and cast me down. 

In oriental life deep mourners sat in ashes, threw ashes upon 
their heads, and thus ashes might come into their food. So the 
mourners' oft-flowing tears became mixed with his drink — all by 
reason of " the wrath of the Lord," probably as manifested toward 
the Zion he so tenderly loved. Personal sufferings from persecu- 
tion or otherwise may have been involved, as in the case of Jere- 
miah. " Thou hast lifted me up and cast me down " seems to 

imply, raising one high to give him a deeper and more dangerous , 
fall. Instead of this, the Hebrew suggests the figure of a tempest 
or whirlwind by which one is caught up and hurled violently for- 
ward or cast away. 

11. My days are like a shadow that declineth ; and I am 
withered like grass. 

"A shadow that declineth" is literally a shadow stretched out, 
as shadows lengthen rapidly just when they are taking their flight. 
Wasting grief, perhaps sickness, is cutting short his days. 

12. But thou, O Lord, shalt endure forever ; and thy re- 
membrance unto all generations. 



PSALM CII. 



413 



"But Thou," in the strongest contrast with my case. And this 
is my comfort — nay more, my joy — that my God lives, and will live 

forever.- " Thy remembrance" should probably be, thy memorial 

name. Hebrew usage favors this sense. The meaning then would 
be that the faithfulness and love expressed in that memorial 
name [Jehovah] shall endure through all generations. God not 
only lives forever but will be forever the same faithful, loving God, 
the everlasting hope and joy of his trustful people. 

13. Thou shalt arise, and have mercy upon Zion: for 
the time to favor her, yea, the set time, is come. 

14. For thy servants take pleasure in her stones, and 
favor the dust thereof 

" Shalt arise " — as if from a sitting posture he aroused himself 
to the most vigorous exertion of his saving power. The impor- 
tant word "for" * ["for the time; " "for thy servants"] admits 
almost equally well of being translated "for " as a logical reason, 
and when with reference to time. If the latter be chosen io will 
of course assume the certainty of the event, and the event will 
bear the same logical relation to its antecedent as if the sense 
"for" were given it. Thus: Nothing is more certain than that 
God will arise for mercy to Zion when his appointed time shall 
have come, which time is in the divine plan and can not fail. So 
also the set time will surely have come when God's servants shall 
manifest their sympathy with her ruined stones and give themselves 
with all their souls to her rebuilding. God's set time will be indi- 
cated by the hearts of his people.- Let it not be overlooked that 

this faith in God's returning to rebuild Zion lifts the load of grief 
from this smitten sufferer's heart. Inspired by such faith and hope 
he can bear any thing; he practically knows no more any sorrow, 
i — The logical relations of thought in the passage are also richly 
instructive. God will arise to restore Zion, for the thing is fixed 
in his, mind ; will thus arise when this time shall have come ; and 
it will have come, you may know, when his servants give the love . 

of their heart to Zion and the power of their hand to her work. 

Plainly the writer lived at a point where he saw, present, or in 
the near prospect, the desolation of Zion, and in the certain future, 
her glorious restoration. The latter referred primarily to the 
time of Cyrus. 

15. So the heathen shall fear the name of the Lord, and 
all the kings of the earth thy glory. 

16. When the Lord shall build up Zion, he shall appear 
in his glory. 

"So" — in consequence of such manifestations of God's power 
and love for his Zion the heathen would be impressed with the 



414 



PSALM CII. 



fear of Jehovah ; the kings of the earth would see his glory. 

In v. 16 the tenses being future, seem to demand this construc- 
tion : For the Lord -will then have built Zion ; he will have dis- 
played his magnificent glory. That is, the time is past with close 
reference to the fear of the name of the Lord and the beholding 
of his glory which are the logical antecedents. 

17. He will regard the prayer of the destitute, and not 
despise their prayer. 

" The prayer of the destitute " — in Hebrew, the naked one, the 
most utterly destitute and helpless. When his people have this 
feeling and come before God in conscious want and conscious 
weakness, yet taking hold of his strength as their legitimate hope, 
God will never despise their prayer. 

18. This shall be written for the generation to come : and 
the people which shall be created shall praise the Lord. 

These things would be put on record for coming ages. Let all 

people read and know, and knowing, praise the Lord Jehovah ! 

" The people which shall be created " — the people then composing 
the Lord's Zion, then constituting his church, shall sing Hallelu- 
jah, i. e., praise the Lord. The expression seems to be parallel to 
Ps. 22: 31: "They shall declare his righteousness unto a people 
that shall be born," i. c, to a future generation. There is no 
adequate authority in Hebrew usage for assuming a special refer- 
ence to the new birth. 

19. For he hath looked down from the height of his 
sanctuary ; from heaven did the Lord behold the earth ; 

20. To hear the groaning of the prisoner; to loose those 
that are appointed to death ; 

21. To declare the name of the Lord in Zion, and his 
praise in Jerusalem ; 

22. When the people arc gathered together, and the 
kingdoms, to serve the Lord. 

"For" — the logical reason — "he [the Lord] hath bent himself 
over [Hebrew] from his holy height — yea, from heaven hath the 
* Lord looked down to earth" — for what? Not to pay his respects 
to earth's great men or its dazzling glories, but to hear the groan- 
ing of the prisoner; to loose the bands of the sons of death, i. e., 
those foredoomed to die, on the verge of death, [" the soul that 
sinneth shall die "] ; to declare the name of Jehovah in Zion [i. e., 
to manifest what the name Jehovah implies], and to set forth in 
Jerusalem his praise-worthy qualities and deeds, when the nations 
shall be assembled there and the kingdoms to serve the Lord. The 
last named point assumes that this event — the gathering of all the 
nations to Zion to learn of God and to worship him, is already 
foreshown — a thing of prophecy and of faith. Isaiah and Micah, 
not to name others, had foretold it in essentially these same words. 



PSALM CII. 



415 



23. He weakened my strength in the way ; he shortened 
my days. 

24. I said, O my God, take me not away in the midst of 
my days ; thy years are throughout all generations. 

By a very sudden transition of thought the writer recurs again 

to his sad experiences as in vs. 3-11. "He breaketh down my 

strength in the way," i. e., in the course of his providential lead- 
ings: " he cuts short my days " — said probably with reference to 
the severity of his trials and labors, or possibly persecutions. 

Jeremiah might have said this with special pertinence. " Take 

me not away" is more exactly, Take me not up, with possible refer- 
ence to the case of '"Elijah, "taken up." "In the midst," liter- 
ally, in the half of my days ; when they are but half numbered. 

" Thy years run through all generations." But what is the 

relation of thought between the preceding words and these ? Is 
it — Why shouldest thou not give thy servants more days on earth 
when thy years stretch on so far ? Or is it rather this : Short 
though my days may be, yet my God lives on with never waning 
strength and no end of his years. Let this be my joy — that his 
thoughts of love will endure and he will never lack the power to 
fulfill them. The following context and the entire scope of the 
Psalm favor the latter view. 

25. Of old hast thou laid the foundation of the earth: 
and the heavens are the work of thy hands. 

26. They shall perish, but thou shalt endure ; yea, all of 
them shall wax old like a garment ; as a vesture shalt thou 
change them, and they shall be changed : 

27. But thou art the same, and thy years shall have no 
end. 

"Of old" — more literally, aforetime, said of what is before, but 
here certainly with reference to time. I understand the passage 
to allude tacitly to those striking words which solemnly affirm that 
God's covenant with his people shall outlast the heavens, be 
more sure than the ordinances of the sun and the moon in the 
sky. In Jer. 31 : 35-37, on this wise : " Thus saith the Lord who 
giveth the sun for a light by day and the ordinances of the moon 
and of the stars for a light by night, the Lord of Hosts is his 
name ; If those ordinances depart from before me, saith the Lord, 
then the seed of Israel also shall cease from being a nation be- 
fore me forever," etc. Also Jer. 33 : 20-22. The fact that the 
known - writings of Jeremiah use this illustration so familiarly 
may be allowed to favor the theory that he is the author of 

this Psalm. The sentiment is grand. Human life is too short 

for man to form and execute great plans ; for how often is his 
strength cut off in the midst of his work ? But God's years 
roll on forever. The sun and the stars will fade out, but his 
strength remains unwasted for evermore ! — -"Thou art the same," 



416 



PSALM CIIL 



literally, Thou art he — an expressive affirmation of God's change- 
less being; — for evermore thou art He — all there is in God re- 
maining forever the same. It is remarkable that the writer 

to the Hebrews (1 : 10-12) assumes that this passage ascribes 
Creatorship to the Son of God. This obviously implies that God 
as revealed to his people under the name Jehovah, the great " 1 
am" was really the eternal Son. 

28. The children of thy servants shall continue, and their 
seed shall be established before thee. 

God's servants individually may be cut short of life and die; 
but their generations shall endure; their children shall rise up to 
fill their places, and then their children's children, so that God's 
covenant shall stand and the seed of the righteous be established 
before God. So the church has a sort of earthly immortality ; God's 
earthly kingdom shall not end while the world shall stand. Let 
this be the consolation of any and every "afflicted one" "when 
he is overwhelmed and poureth out his complaint before the Lord." 

PSALM cm. 

This sweet Psalm, so richly expressive of grateful homage to the 
Glorious Giver of all good, supplying through all the ages since it 
was written the choicest words for the noblest sentiments and af- 
fections toward God — is briefly ascribed to David. As to the pre- 
cise sense in which it is David's, the reader will please recur to the 

remarks introductory to Ps. 101. The first and central thought — 

"Bless the Lord, O my soul " — is justified and enforced by a recital 
of individual, personal, mercies (vs. 3-5) ; by a broader view of 
his mercies to the specially needy and to his covenant people (vs. 
6j 7) ; by a view of his intrinsic character as a God of mercy (vs. 
8, 9) ; as manifested toward all his penitent children (vs. 10-14 ; 
for which there is manifold occasion in the fact of human frailty 
(vs. 15, 16). This mercy is most enduring (vs. 17, 18); issuing 
forth from a throne forever fixed and supreme (v. 19) — which su- 
premacy embraces the angelic hosts and calls upon them for 
adoring homage (vs. 20, 21); and finally in like manner upon all 
his works — beings and things — every-where in his universe ; and 
last, upon the writer's OAvn soul (v. 22). 

1. Bless the Lord, O my soul : and all that is within 
me, bless his holy name. 

"Bless" as here, is scarcely distinguishable from praise. It 
makes prominent the thought of giving honor and glory to God ; it 
may include wishing him joy in the exercise of his mercy and 

rejoicing personally in his infinite happiness. "All that is 

within me" — all my noblest powers— my voice, my song, my 



PSALM CIII. 



417 



grateful emotions, the love of my heart, my willing spirit and 
obedient life. 

2. Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his 
benefits : 

3. Who forgiveth all thine iniquities ; who healeth all 
thy diseases ; 

4. Who redeemeth thy life from destruction ; who crown- 
eth thee with loving-kindness and tender mercies ; 

5. Who satisfieth thy mouth with good things ; so that thy 
youth is renewed like the eagle's. 

These verses enumerate personal blessings from God. Most 
fitly the first is forgiveness of sin. Who does not feel that this 

blessing towers high above all others possible to sinners? 

Restoration from sickness has appropriately the next place. 

In v. 5, the translation "mouth" has no support from Hebrew 
usage. The word used * means elsewhere ornament, adornment 
Here, apparently, our highest glory as beings — that which gives 
us our distinguished pre-eminence among the lower orders of 
creatures, and well translated soul, in the same way in which the 
usual Hebrew word for glory sometimes means soul [e. g., Ps. 16 : 
9J. Satisfying the soul with good, renews one's youth like the 
eagle's. A happy heart doeth good like a medicine. It becomes 
a good, not to the soul only, but through sympathy, to the body as 
well. 

6. The Lord executeth righteousness and judgment for 
all that are oppressed. 

Rising from personal blessings to general, the comprehensive 
fact, evermore to the glory of God, is his sympathy with the suffer- 
ing and oppressed, and his ready and effective interposition in their 
case. Who will not praise him that he careth so kindly and so 
gloriously for those who suffer cruel wrongs from wicked op- 
pressors ? 

7. Pie made known his ways unto Moses, his acts unto 
the children of Israel. 

These "ways" made known to Moses and his people Israel, were 
specimen cases under the general fact just mentioned — " righteous- 
ness and judgment for all the oppressed." 

8. The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger, 
and plenteous in mercy. 

9. He will not always chide : neither will he keep his 
anger forever. 

"Jehovah merciful and gracious," as he announced his immortal 
name* to Moses (recorded Ex. 34: 5-7). Moses had said: "I be- 



418 



PSALM CIII. 



seech thee, show me thy glory; " and God replied: "I will make 
all my goodness pass before thee, and will proclaim the name of 
the Lord before thee." To that wonderfully comprehensive and 
descriptive name the Psalmist here refers: "Merciful and gra- 
cious." 

10. He hath not dealt with us after our sins ; nor re- 
warded us according to our iniquities. 

11. For as the heaven is high above the earth, so great 
is his mercy toward them that fear him. 

12. As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he 
removed our transgressions from us. 

His retribution for our sins has fallen far below our deserts. 
Probation is itself merciful and involves immense long-suffering 
and the glorious possibility on every sinner's part of turning back 
to God, and in this event, the certainty of forgiveness. The height 
of the heavens above the earth helps us to conceive the greatness 
of this mercy toward- those who humbly fear him. Beautifully 
the Hebrew has it: As God has put the east far away from the 
west, so hath he put our sins far away from us — to be remem- 
bered no more against us ! The pardon he giveth is pardon 
indeed. Your sins and your iniquities shall be not even remem- 
bered any more. He says the same thing strongly through Micah 
(Mic. 7: 18, 19). 

13. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord 
pitieth them that fear him. 

14. For he knoweth our frame ; he remembereth that we 
are dust. 

This illustration comes home to human bosoms, or rather, is 
drawn from the impulses and the love of human souls. As the 
human father has a warm heart [Hebrew] toward his children, 
so has the Lord toward those that fear him — his filial, obedient, 
children. For he knows our make — our constitution and its inhe- 
rent frailties and weaknesses; he remembers that these bodies 
were made of dust; subject, therefore, to temptation, pain, and 
death. 

15. As for man, his days are as grass : as a flower of the 
field, so he flourisheth. 

16. For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and 
the place thereof shall know it no more. 

"As for man" very frail is he, as the word chosen here for 
man implies. He is compared to the grass whose natural life is 
only a few months at longest. As the blossom flowers, so he blos- 
soms for his brief day, the Hebrew beautifully using the same 
word for the field-blossom and for the man, blossoming. For a 



PSALM CIIL 



419 



breath of air, a gentle wind * passes over him and he is gone. It 
would not be so strange if a tempest, a whirlwind, passing over 
should sweep him away. The Psalmist means much more than 
this. The gentlest touch, the whispering breeze, bears him off. 
He soon becomes a stranger, no more known in the little space he 
once filled, going out and coming in. 

17. But the mercy of the Lord is from everlasting to 
everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness 
unto children's children ; 

18. To such as keep his covenant, and to those that re- 
member his commandments to do them. 

Over against the briefness of man's life and the transientness of 
all his doings stand the enduring mercy of the Lord and his per- 
petual remembrance of his covenant people. O how unlike to 
man's few days are his immortal years ! How much more endur- 
ing his love and sure his promised blessings than any good guar- 
anteed to us only by frail, short-lived man ! 

19. The Lord hath prepared his throne in the heavens ; 
and his kingdom ruleth over all. 

It is ground for the purest joy that God's throne is fixed too 
high to be endangered by his petty, puny foes — too exalted to be 
obscured by their malicious endeavors. His kingdom embraces 
all that live, excepting none. 

20. Bless the Lord, ye his angels, that excel in 
strength, that do his commandments, hearkening unto the 
voice of his word. 

21. Bless ye the Lord, all ye his hosts ; ye ministers of 
his, that do his pleasure. 

These few words descriptive of the angels are by no means ex- 
haustive. Yet the points given are of the first importance; 
" mighty in strength," i. e., of most exalted powers and capabili- 
ties : And evermore obedient to the mandates of the Most High, 
diligently hearkening to catch every word from his lips and ever- 
more swift to execute it. Upon all these noblest of created beings 
the Psalmist calls to bless the Lord Jehovah. 

22. Bless the Lord, all his works in all places of his 
dominion : bless the Lord, O my soul. 

The last specification is completely comprehensive; all his 
works in all places of his wide dominions " — all that he has made, 
whether intelligent or not intelligent; "in all places" — above, be- 
neath, around : in heaven, earth, or hell : let them all fall into this 
universal chorus of praise and blessing, extolling Jehovah, the 

nn* 



420 



PSALM CIV. 



One supremely great, supremely good ! Xor will he exempt 

himself; for his personal responsibilities as to his own heart are 
his highest. Therefore he closes as he began, " Bless the Lord, 
0 my soul! " 

PSALM CIV. 

This Psalm stands without caption. In subject it bears close re- 
lations to Ps. 103 — a circumstance strongly in favor of referring 
it to the same author. It enlarges the glorious theme of praise to 
God by setting forth his wonderful works in the material world. 
It is God in nature, yet not at all in the pantheistic sense — nature 
itself a part of God; but in the far nobler sense, a personal God, 
the Infinite Creator of all material things, for evermore energizing 
by his present hand to sustain the forces which supply from the 
material world the wants of all the living. Remarkably the course 
of thought follows somewhat definitely the order of topics pre- 
sented in the original account of the creation given [Gen. 1] by 
Moses: God the glorious Creator; investing himself with light; 
stretching out the broad expanse of the visible heavens ; locating 
the waters that belong above the firmament; the clouds also and 
the winds; fixing the solid earth and gathering together 'the 
waters appropriated to its surface and thus providing for the 
springs and rivers that supply animal want and insure_the fruits 
of the earth. Thus the author's mind ranges on, as of one whose 
open eye has traced out the marvelous ways of God in blessing 
all his vast family of living creatures — themes on which it is sweet 
to dwell, and which call forth from his grateful, adoring soul 
praises ever fresh to the great Father of all. 

1. Bless the Lord, O my soul. O Loed my God, thou 
art very great ; thou art clothed with honor and majesty : 

2. Who coverest thyself with light as ivith a garment; who 
stretchest out the heavens like a curtain : 

3. Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the waters ; 
who maketh the clouds his chariot : who walketh upon the 
wings of the wind : 

' ( Thou art very great " — the comprehensive fact which the whole 

Psalm expands and illustrates. "Coverest thyself with light" 

is put sublimely by Paul (1 Tim. 6: 16): "Dwelling in the light 

which no man can approach unto." "Stretching out the 

heavens like a curtain," of course contemplates the heavens as 
visible to us— the expanse above us in which we see the heavenly 

bodies. " Who layeth the beams of his chambers in the 

waters," follows the ancient Hebrew conception which indeed ap- 
pears in Gen. 1, that God divided the waters of our globe into two 
parts, storing one part above the supposed solid firmament, and 



PSALM CIV. 



421 



the other in the oceans and seas of our earth. In the former he 
laid the beams of his upper chambers, those grand apartments 
of the universe Avhich are his own special abode. It is of no im- 
portance for us to inquire whether this poetical conception is true 
to fact and nature. The Scriptures were not designed to teach 

us celestial geography in a scientific way. The phenomena of 

rain seemed to the ancients to imply a store-house of waters 
above, and therefore their poetic imaginations assumed it. So 
far as divine revelation is concerned, the Lord let it pass, wav- 
ing that whole subject in order to teach us more important things. 

" The clouds his chariot," and the thunder the roar of its 

wheels. "Walking upon the wings" — but the incongruity of 

walking on wings is not to be charged upon the Hebrew author, 
who said only — moving, traversing the regions of space on the wings 
of wind. 

4. Who maketh his angels spirits ; his ministers a flam- 
ing fire: 

This verse demands patient attention. 

(1) Some maintain that the angels of Scripture, the intelligent 
beings appearing so often in sacred history, are not here at all. 
They translate — "Who maketh the winds his messengers; the 
lightnings his ministers ; L e-, who uses both the winds and the 
lightnings as his servants. Against this construction lie the con- 
stant usage of the Hebrew word to signify an order of intelligent 
beings, and the authority oPthe writer to the Hebrews who quotes 
the passage (Heb. 1 : 7) in an argument which assumes that the 
word refers to beingg of intelligence. 

(2) A few critics have explained the passage, Who maketh his 
angels incorporeal — pure spirits, made out of wind as best repre- 
senting the invisible nature of spirits. Also "his ministers" — a 
parallel expression — out of fire, lightning. But this construction 
scarcely deserves serious refutation. It is entirely foreign to the 
scope of the Psalm which treats of the material works of God; 
the sense it brings out conflicts with the constant representa- 
tion of the Scriptures, in which angels continually appear clad 
in material forms. Yet of the nature of these material bodies 
it were vain for us to speculate further than to say — They are not 
brought before us as incorporeal, i. e., as purely spiritual beings. 

(3) A third construction has found much favor among critics, 
thus : " Who maketh his angels as or like the winds, and as the 
lightnings— swift in motion, mighty in power." The main objection 
to this is, it seems to be aside from the scope of the Psalm. 

(4) A fourth construction has the voice of a large part of the 
best modern critics. It may be expressed thus : " Who employs his 
angels upon the winds; his messengers upon the lightnings, i. e., 
who works the tempest and the lightning at his pleasure by the 

agency of his angels. The grandeur of this conception is in 

striking harmony with the scope of the sublime things before the 
poet's mind. Its thought moreover is germain to the theme of 



422 



PSALM CIV. 



the Psalm — God's ways and workings in the material world. Nor 
can there be any doubt that this sentiment is in accordance 
with truth, at least in regard to whatever supernatural agencies 
God may employ through tempest .and storm. On this remark- 
able passage the reader may be interested to see the views of 
various critics. — Gesenius on the word " angel :" " By their agency 
are wrought the phenomena of nature " — citing as a case -this 
passage. Fuerst, also on the word as in the passage: " He" [the 
angel] 4i appears as tempest or lightning." Rev. Alfred Barry, in 
Smith's Bible Dictionary: "The operations of nature are spoken 
of as under angelic guidance, fulfilling the will of God." Not only 
is this the case in poetical passages such as Ps. 104: 4 (com- 
mented on in Heb. 1 : 7), but in the simplest prosaic history, e. g., 
Ex. 12: 23 and Heb. 11: 28. Stuart (Apoe. II: 400) : "It seems 
probable that the passage [Ps. 104: 4 and Heb. 1 : 7] is to be ex- 
plained in reference to the views of the Jews as connected with 
the subject of guardian angels over the elements." — Olshausen 
[on Heb. 1:7]: " Scripturally the angels are powers of God, i. e., 
personal creatures, furnished with peculiar powers, through whom 
God works wonders in the kingdom of nature, and whom he ac- 
cordingly makes to be storm-winds and flames of fire in as far as 
he lets them, so to speak, incorporate themselves with these ele- 
ments and operations of nature." It only remains to say that 

in this view of its meaning, the passage is beautifully appropriate 
to the argument of the writer to the Hebrews. The angels are 
exalted in dignity, great in strength, grand in their working, but 
yet are far below the Son of God. 

5. Who laid the foundations of the earth, that it should 
not be removed forever. 

The firmness of the earth's deep foundations was a favorite and 
precious thought in the Hebrew mind. Yet how much is the grand- 
cur of our conceptions enhanced when we come to understand 
(as they did not) that the simple law of gravitation holds the earth 
in its orbit and all the matter of our globe to its place ! 

6. Thou coveredst it with the deep as with a garment : 
the waters stood above the mountains. 

7. At thy rebuke they fled ; at the voice of thy thunder 
they hasted away. 

8. They go up by the mountains ; they go down by the 
valle} r s unto the place which thou hast founded for them. 

9. Thou hast set a bound that they may not pass over ; 
that they turn not again to cover the earth. 

Exegetically, the question here is whether the passage refers to 
the era of the creation or to that of the deluge in the age of Noah. 
Inasmuch as the chaotic state (Gen. 1 : 2) involved essentially a 
deluge — a submergence of the earth under water, the phenomena 
in the two cases — the primeval chaos and the deluge of Noah 



PSALM CIV. 



423 



must have been quite similar. Most of the points made in these 
verses were fulfilled in both. The last point made in v. 9 is an 
exception to this remark, since it refers manifestly to the deluge 
of Noah and is inapplicable to the primeval chaos ; " that they turn 

not again to cover the earth." v. 8 were better read : " They 

ascend or climb the mountains: they flow back into the valleys," 
etc. 

10. He sendeth the springs into the valleys, which run 
among the hills. 

11. They give drink to every beast of the field: the 
wild asses quench their thirst. 

The beautiful provision of mountain reservoirs which feed the 
springs, which again feed the rivers that flow in the valleys, is 
ascribed to God's hand which " sendeth them forth." 

12. By them shall the fowls of the heaven have their 
habitation, ivhich sing among the branches ' 

13. He watereth the hills from his chambers : the earth 
is satisfied with the fruit of thy works. 

"By them," i. e., by the side of these water-courses; for the 
beauties of' the river system are not complete without trees on 

their banks and singing birds in the trees. The hills are 

watered from God's " chambers," the same word as in v. 3. The 
palaces of God, his upper halls above the sky, are thought to rest 
upon the superincumbent mass of waters above the firmament — 

the great reservoir for our earth. The earth is satisfied, i. e., 

sated, amply supplied with water and all things necessary to fer- 
tility. 

14. He causeth the grass to grow for the cattle, and herb 
for the service of man : that he may bring forth food out of 
the earth ; 

15. And wine that maketh glad the heart of man, and oil 
to make his face to shine, and bread ivhich strengthened 
man's heart. 

" Herb for the service of man," should rather be, the herb for the 
culture of man, for him to cultivate for his subsistence. The al- 
lusion to "oil" does not class it as one of these products of the 
earth, but makes it a figure of comparison, thus : " And wine that 
gladdens man's heart to make his face shine more than oil." 
The English margin suggests this ; the Hebrew demands it. 

16. The trees of the Lord are full of sap ; the cedars of 
Lebanon, which he hath planted; 

17. Where the birds make their nests ; as for the stork, 
the fir trees are her house. 



424 



PSALM CIV. 



18. The high hills are a refuge for the wild goats; and 
the rocks for the conies. 

The Lord's trees are the noblest, grandest of all, as ''the mount- 
tains of God " are the loftiest. The special reference here is to 
the cedars of Lebanon, first in grandeur among trees known to 
the Hebrew people. Not specifically " full of sa-p" but accord- 
ing to the scope of the context, supplied with moisture, and there- 
fore kept in vigorous growth. " The conies," an animal resem- 
bling the rabbit, yet unknown in America. All that is important 
here is that the rocky districts were its home, God having utilized 
the whole face of the earth by giving existence to animals adapted 
to all varieties of soil, climate, condition. 

19. He appointed the moon for seasons : the sun knoweth 
his going down. 

20. Thou makest darkness, and it is night : wherein all 
the beasts of the forest do creep forth. 

21. The young lions roar after their prey, and seek their 
meat from God. 

22. The sun ariseth, they gather themselves together, 
and lay them down in their dens. 

" The moon for seasons," i. e., for set times, the Hebrew months 
being lunar and their festivals being fixed by the changes of the 

moon. "Beasts of the forest creep forth," not stealthily, but as 

those who are in their place and on their own time. God made 
them for night work. "Seek their food from God" — not by ask- 
ing in prayer, but in the way of seeking by instinct what his care- 
ful bounty has provided. The Psalmist purposely honors God as 
the Great Provider for even the powerful lion. 

23. Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labor 
until the evening. 

As the wild animals improve the night to get their food, man 
uses the day for his labor. God's plan avoids their interference 
with each other. 

24. O Lord, how manifold are thy works! in wisdom 
hast thou made them all : the earth is full of thy riches. 

The natural and appropriate reflection from such a survey of 
God's works in the material world and in his general providence. 
What wisdom shines forth in all these wonderful adaptations of 
earth to man and beast ! The earth so amply furnished with all 
most needful things reminds the Psalmist of some wealthy man's 
establishment, supplied with all that industry and wealth can pro- 
vide. 

25. So is this great and wide sea, wherein are things 
creeping innumerable, both small and great beasts. 



PSALM CIV. 



425 



26. There go the ships : there is that leviathan, whom 
thou hast made to play therein. 

27. These wait all upon thee ; that thou mayest give them 
their meat in due season. 

28. Tlmt thou givest them they gather: thou openest 
thine hand, they are filled with good. 

29. Thou hidest thy face, they are troubled : thou takest 
away their breath, they die, and return to their dust. 

From a survey of the dry land, valley, mountain, he passes to 
the great and wide sea where the ships travel ; where the huge, 
sea-serpent sports, and where countless families of fish are fed 
wonderfully from God's hand. Is there a greater marvel than lies 
in the question — Where is their pasture-ground? What food 
does their Great Maker provide for such countless and almost in- 
finitely various forms, tastes, and wants? 

30. Thou sendest forth thy spirit, they are created : and 
thou renewest the face of the earth. 

Does this passage throw light on the question of new creations ? 
In my view, not necessarily, for this may be only the general 
fact that all the creatures contemplated in this Psalm owe their 
existence to God's original creative fiat. " Renewest the face of 
the earth" may be an allusion to its re-peopling after the deluge 
of Noah. 

31. The glory of the Lord shall endure forever: the 
Lord shall rejoice in his works. 

32. He looketh on the earth, and it trembleth : he 
toucheth the hills, and they smoke. 

" The glory of the Lord " as the Great Creator and Father of 
all; i e., the manifestations of his wisdom, power, and love as 
thus made " shall endure forever," evermore a perpetual study 
and joy to his intelligent creatures, evermore a fountain of bless- 
edness to himself. With what glorious majesty and power his 

very look makes the earth tremble ; he has only to " touch the hills 
and they smoke," a beautiful allusion, it would seem, to the phe- 
nomena of volcanoes. 

33. I will sing unto the Lord as long as I live : I will 
sing praise to my God while I have my being. 

34. My meditation of him shall be sweet : I will be 
glad in the Lord. 

Enchanted with his theme, the") author avows his purpose to 
make it his study and the theme of his praise-song through all 
his life — even through his eternal existence. O, will he not enjoy 
it! Will not this study of the Great God in his works be " sweet" 
and his soul as he dwells on it be made "glad in the Lord ? " 



426 



PSALM CV. 



The reader will note that this is one aspect of the work and joy 
of the heavenly world. 

35. Let the sinners be consumed out of the earth, and 
let the wicked be no more. Bless thou the Lord, O my 
soul. Praise ye the Lord. 

What is the connection of thought between this closing verse and 
the rest of the Psalm? It does not lie on the surface but be- 
neath it. When we come fully into sympathy with the writer, 
impressed as he was with the glory of God in all his works, with 
his goodness, his love, his parental care of every living thing, we 
shall begin to understand why he should cry out — O, those en- 
emies of such a God — those rebels against their glorious and lov- 
ing Father ! „ Let them be consumed from the face of the earth ; 
let them be no more! As for me, my whole being cries out; 
"Bless the Lord, 0 my soul! " O all ye people, praise the Lord ! 

PSALM CV. 

This Psalm is only a variation upon the general theme of the 
two that precede it — the grounds of praise and thanksgiving to 
God for his mercies. Whereas Ps. 104 expatiates upon the works 
of God in the material world, its creation and its agencies ; this 

Psalm gives a corresponding view of God's hand in history his 

ways with his covenant people from the promise of Canaan to 
Abraham and the patriarchs to its fulfilment under Joshua in 
locating the tribes safely in that land of promise. 

This Psalm traverses somewhat the same ground with Ps. 78, 
with however these two points of difference : (a) that whereas that 
Psalm passes repeatedly from God's mercies to the people's sins, 
this restricts itself to the ways of his mercy, reserving the provoca- 
tions and rebellions of the people to Ps. 106 : (b) that whereas in 
Ps. 78 the ultimate purpose of the writer was to affirm and justify 
God's choice of Judah before Ephraim as the tribe from which to 
take the royal family and within which to locate his sanctuary, 
the writer's purpose here is rather in general to give the grounds 
of praise, adoration and thanksgiving to the God of their nation's 
covenant, and in particular to inspire hope in God for deliverance 

from the national calamities then present or impending. It 

should be noted that vs. 1-15 of this Psalm appear nearly in the 
same words in I Chron. 16 ; 8-22 ; there ascribed to David. The 
case shows how later authors made free use of the earlier writings 
of inspired men, especially of David. 

1. O give thanks unto the Lord ; call upon his name : 
make known his deeds among the people. 



PSALM CV. 



427 



2. Sing unto him, sing psalms unto him : talk ye of all 
his wondrous works. 

3. Glory ye in his holy name: let the heart of them 
rejoice that seek the Lord. 

4. Seek the Loud, and his strength : seek his face ever- 
more. 

" Call upon his name " is precisely, call him by his name ; i. e., 
make use of those significant names which especially reveal his 
relations to his chosen people, e. g., Jehovah ; and set forth the 
appropriateness of this name by showing his faithfulness to his an- 
cient promises. "Make known his deeds among the people " — 

hut this being plural means, the peoples, the Gentile nations. 
This point is too important to be obscured by a defective transla- 
tion. " Seek the Lord and his strength " — seek him as the God 

of strength; seek of him the help which his strong arm is mighty 
to give. 

5. Remember his marvelous works that he hath done ; his 
wonders, and the judgments of his mouth: 

6. O ye seed of Abraham his servant, ye children of 
Jacob his chosen. 

"Marvelous works," "wonders" — are his miracles, supernatu- 
ral interpositions of power in the history of our nation. " The 
judgments of his mouth" — the laws and ordinances spoken from 
his hps, including also sentences of judgment upon his enemies, 
e. g., on oppressive Egypt and the corrupt, idolatrous nations of 
ancient Canaan. 

7. He is the Lord our God : his judgments are in all the 
earth. 

While he is pre-eminently our God, his judgments are upon 
other nations also; his rule is over all the earth. Therefore let 
Gentiles as well as Jews give ear to my song. These facts of his- 
tory have lessons for the wide world. 

8. He hath remembered his covenant forever, the word 
which he commanded to a thousand generations. 

9. Which covenant he made with Abraham, and his oath 
unto Isaac : 

10. And confirmed the same unto Jacob for a law, and to 
Israel for an everlasting covenant : 

11. Saying, Unto thee will I give the land of Canaan, the 
lot of your inheritance : 

12. When they were but a few men in number; yea, very 
few, and strangers in it. 

God's covenant with the children of Israel was made when the 
nation was in one man, Abraham. All the more striking and re- 



428 



PSALM CV. 



markable therefore was the fact that God remembered that covenant ; 
continued from time to time to renew it with his posterity, and 
never forgat it. In due time that posterity, having grown into a 
great nation, were planted in the land of promise. 

13. When they went from one nation to another, from 
one kingdom to another people ; 

14. He suffered no man to do them wrong: yea, he 
reproved kings for their sakes ; 

15. Saying, Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets 
no harm. 

" From one kindom to another people," which seems to recognize 
Egypt as a kingdom. The Arab tribes and the petty sovereignties 

of Canaan were only peoples. " The reproving of kings" looks 

toward the case of Pharaoh of Egypt (as in Gen. 12 ; 10-20), and 
of Abimelech of Gerar (Gen. 20: 1-18). Abraham was the 
" prophet " specially in view. (See Gen. 20 : 7.) 

16. Moreover he called for a famine upon the land : he 
brake the whole staff of bread. 

17. He sent a man before them, even Joseph, who was sold 
for a servant ; 

18. "Whose feet they hurt with fetters : he was laid in 
iron : 

19. Until the time that his word came : the word of the 
Lord tried him. 

A famine upon the land of Canaan was God's agency to drive 
Jacob's sons and ultimately himself and household into Egypt. 
But forethoughtful provision was made for them by sending Joseph 
there beforehand. Joseph himself so understood the purpose of 

God. (Gen. 45 : 5). The translation — "he was laid in iron" 

quite avoids the literal form of the Hebrew which is — " His soul 
came into the iron," i. e., the iron fetters, meaning that his nerves, 
his keenest sensibilities, were galled by the fetters of a slave and 

the bands of a prisoner. In v. 19. "His" [Joseph's] 11 word" 

and " the word of the Lord " are not the same term in Hebrew. 
The sense seems to be that until Joseph's word [as an interpreter 
of dreams] "came" to pass, "the word of the Lord," giving him 
those interpretations, tried him greatly; perhaps because on the 
one hand it indicated the divine favor to him, while yet, on the 
other, the long delay of two full years (Gen. 41: 1) between the 
fulfilling of the first interpretations [those of the butler and 
baker] , and his deliverance from prison must have put his faith to 
the sternest test. See the whole history in Gen. 40 and 41. 

20. The king sent and loosed him ; even the ruler of the 
people, and let him go free. 



PSALM CV. 



429 



21. He made him lord of his house, and ruler of all his 
substance : 

22. To bind his princes at his pleasure; and teach his 
senators wisdom. 

In the unfolding of God's plan it came to view that his purpose 
was to bring Joseph before Pharaoh and make him virtually lord 
of all Egypt. So the dark providences of God are wont to be re- 
vealed in due time into glorious light. Is it not well and safe to 
trust him ? 

23. Israel also came into Egypt; and Jacob sojourned 
in the land of Ham. 

24. And he increased his people greatly ; and made them 
stronger than their enemies. 

The history makes special mention (Ex. 1 : 7) of the rapid, 
extraordinary increase of the Hebrew people while in Egypt. 
Fear of their numbers instigated the Egyptians both to impose 
severe tasks and to plot the murder of their male infants (Ex. 1 : 
1-16). 

25. He turned their heart to hate his people, to deal 
subtilely with his servants. 

" He turned their heart to hate his people," yet not neces- 
sarily by any such direct agency as that which turns men's hearts 
from sin to holiness ; but by permitting such events to occur and 
to occur in such relations as produced in their proud, selfish, am- 
bitious souls this hatred of the Hebrew people and this cruelty 
toward them. The actual processes under which Pharaoh's heart 
was hardened, as shown in the history, are a sufficient comment 
on the nature of that divine agency to which the hardening of his 
heart is more than once ascribed. 

26. He sent Moses his servant ; and Aaron whom he had 
chosen. 

27. They showed his signs among them, and wonders in 
the land of Ham. 

"Sent Moses to be his servant" — to act in this capacity. 

"They showed his signs," i. e., they performed miracles as com- 
missioned and directed of God, and did it in the presence of the 
king and his people. 

28. He sent darkness, and made it dark ; and they re- 
belled not against his word. 

The precise sense of this verse is not altogether obvious. Is 
this " darkness " the ninth plague, or does it represent in general 
the whole body of plagues on Egypt? And who are they that 
"did not rebel against his word?" If the Egyptians, then how 
does this comport with the historical fact that they did "rebel" 
repeatedly ?— The Egyptians must be the parties spoken of as " not 

19 



430 



PSALM CV. 



rebelling." Against the supposition that this " darkness " was 

the ninth special plague stands the fact that it was not this plague 
but the death of all their first-born which ultimately broke them 
down. I prefer therefore to interpret darkness here in its general 
sense of calamity, and the passage as comprehensively affirming 
that God sent on them terrible calamities until they no longer re- 
belled against his word, but succumbed. God sent darkness in 
the sense of plague after plague till the Egyptians rebelled no 
longer. Having said this in general, the Psalmist proceeds to the 
details. 

29. He turned their waters into blood, and slew their fish. 

30. Their land brought forth frogs in abundance, in the 
chambers of their kings. 

31. He spake, and there came divers sorts of flies, and 
lice in all their coasts. 

These plagues on Egypt, (1) Water becoming blood; (2) Frogs; 
(3) Flies; (4 1 ) Lice — are in essentially the same historical order 
as in Moses (Ex. 7 : 20, 21 and 8 : 6, 17, 21). The striking point 
in the narration here is that the miraculous power is attributed to 
the divine word: " He spalce, and flies came, and lice in all their 
coasts." So in the original creation : "he spake and it was." 

32. He gave them hail for rain, and flaming fire in their 
land. 

33. He smote their vines also and their fig trees ; and 
brake the trees of their coasts. 

34. He spake, and the locusts came, and caterpillars, and 
that without number. 

35. And did eat up all the herbs in their land, and de- 
voured the fruit of their ground. 

"He made their rain hail" [Hebrew] — all the more terrible in 
Egypt from the fact that even rain is so very unusual there. 

The "flaming fire" was lightning — most terrific in Egypt. 

In this as in the case of the lice and the flies, God spake and the 
locusts came. The poetic conception makes them the army of the 
Lord, moving in mighty phalanx at his word of command. The 
reader will note that this way of representing the miraculous 
agency in these plagues is used only of animals, vtho move obedient 
to the voice of God. 

36. He smote also all the first-born in their land, the 
chief of all their strength. 

"The chief of all their strength" is quite in harmony with the 
Hebrew idea of the first-born, as may be seen in Jacob's words of 
his Reuben [Gen. 49: 3], and in the Mosaic statutes [Deut. 21 : 
17], in both which passages, however, the word hero translated 
"chief" is translated "beginning." This death-scene was the 



PSALM CV. 



431 



unendurable plague which broke the spirit of both people and 
king. 

37. He brought them forth also with silver and gold ; and 
there ivas not one feeble person among their tribes. 

It was of the Lord's justice that these bondmen were not al- 
lowed to go forth empty-handed. He directed them to borrow 
[the Hebrew is simply ask'] of the Egyptians. The last plague 
made them willing to lend or give. It was but moderate wages 

for their life-long services [Ex. 11: 2 and 12: 35, 36]. ".Not 

one halting, tottering one in their tribes " — unable to march. The 
fact is extraordinary, indicating either miracle, or an unprece- 
dented vigor pervading the whole nation. Supernatural agency 
should not be assumed where natural agencies suffice, as here. 
The history of slavery in our own country shows that severe toil 
and hard bondage are not incompatible with physical vigor. 

38. Egypt was glad when they departed : for the fear of 
them fell upon them. 

u TVas glad," for the death of the first-born in every house was 
fearfully suggestive of what might come next. " We be all dead 
men" [Ex. 12: 33]. 

39. He spread a cloud for a covering ; and fire to give 
light in the night. 

Kapidly the poet now touches the salient points of their history; 
here, the wonderful pillar which was cloud by day and fire by night, 
the visible manifestation of God's presence, guiding them through 
all that pathless wilderness [Ex. 13 : 21, 22]. 

40. TJie people asked, and he brought quails, and satisfied 
them with the bread of heaven. 

41. He opened the rock, and the waters gushed out; they 
ran in the dry places like a river. 

The cases of the quails, the manna, and the smitten rock and its 
gushing floods of water, are touched only in the briefest manner. 
See the more full notice in the history [Ex. 16: 12-35 and in Ps. 
78: 18-29]. In this passage the quantity of water is shown to 
have been great. 

42. For he remembered his holy promise, and Abraham 
his servant. 

43. And he brought forth his people with joy and his 
chosen with gladness : 

44. And gave them the lands of the heathen : and they 
inherited the labor of the people ; 

45. That they might observe his statutes, and keep his 
laws. Praise ye the Lord. 



432 



PSALM CVL 



The conclusion of this song gives us its animus and purpose, 
viz., to illustrate God's faithfulness in promise, and to inspire hope 
and confidence in him for similar faithfulness in the present and 
in the future. This God of the ancient promises and of these 
wonderful achievements in fulfilling them, is our God forever and 
ever : Praise him, all ye people ! 

PSALM CVI. 

This Psalm belongs to the same family with the three that next 
precede it, with specially close relations to its nearest one, Ps. 105. 
Whereas that recites and reviews the divine mercies to Israel from 
Abraham to the possession of Canaan, this is mainly occupied with 
the recital of their ingratitude, rebellion, and idolatry — a dark, 
humiliating catalogue ! The moral aim of this showing is suffi- 
ciently apparent, viz., to humble the nation, bring them to repent- 
ance, and encourage them to cry unto God for his pardoning mercy 
and gracious help in their then present emergencies. The prayer 
at the close (v. 47), "Save us," "gather us from among the 
heathen," plainly implies that the Psalm was written at some 
point, early or late, and probably early, during the exile in Baby- 
lon. During that period the Lord's prophets, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, 
and Daniel, were inspired with earnest words and powerful appeals 
to the people, designed to secure the very ends contemplated in this 
Psalm — national humiliation, repentance, and prayerful hope in 
God's faithfulness and mercy. Dan. 9 may be laid beside this 
Psalm for comparison. The name of the author of these Psalms 
(104-106) is not given and can not be ascertained. 

1. Praise ye the Lord. O give thanks unto the Lord ; 

for he is good : for his mercy endureih forever. 

2. Who can utter the mighty acts of the Lord ? who can 
show forth all his praise? 

"Who can utter," "show forth" "all his praise?" seems to 
be a concluding inference from the three Psalms immediately 
preceding this. The writer would say ; We have been taking an 
inventory of the mercies of God toward our world and especially 
our nation, but who can enumerate them all ? We are lost in the 
countless multitude ; the footing can never be made up ; the count 
surpasses all numerical computation. Who has ever put himself 
to the work and did not quickly reach the same conviction: 
" When all thy mercies, 0 my God, 

My rising soul surveys ; 
Transported -with the view, I'm lost 
In wonder, love and praise." 

3. Blessed are they that keep judgment, and he that 
doeth righteousness at all times. 



PSALM CVI. 



433 



The relation of thought between this verse and those that pre- 
cede it would seein to be this: In view of all this unmeasured 
goodness and wealth of proffered mercy, how blessed must it be 
to have this God for our Friend; to be at one with him as the 
moral King of the universe ! Such is the case of those who " keep 
judgment," always executing justice, always acting in the fear of 
the Lord and in true obedience to his law. 

4. Remember me, O Lord, with the favor that thou beared 
unto thy people : O visit me with thy salvation ; 

5. That I may see the good of thy chosen, that I may 
rejoice in the gladness of thy nation, that I may glory with 
thine inheritance. 

The lot of God's obedient people must be most blessed ; let me 
never miss but always enjoy it I Let others pant for gold or fame, 
length of days and fullness of all earthly good : — it shall suffice me 
.to have the lot of thy people ; to see their blessedness and be glad- 
dened with their joy ! Considered as a preface to this Psalm, 

the tone of these remarks has this significance and bearing: — The 
wealth of blessing God gives his people being so great, how sad it 
must be to miss it by means of sin ! How tenderly earnest is the 
appeal to a sinning people to consider their ways ; to measure their 
' infinite loss ; and be moved to the depth of their souls toward 
repentance and supplication for pardoning mercy ! 

6. We have sinned with our fathers, we have committed 
iniquity, we have done wickedly. 

A sudden transition here brings him face to face with the main 

theme of this Psalm — the sins of the people. " We have sinned 

with our fathers ; we as well as they ; we in much the same manner 
as they. And since they suffered fearful chastisements* for their 
sin, so are we destined to like suffering. As they oftentimes found 
mercy by crying mightily to God in their distresses, so [hopefully] 
may we also. Of the three verbs in this verse, meaning in gene- 
ral to sin, the first means primarily to miss the mark, to come short 
of the proper aim of duty; the second suggests moral perverse- 
ness ; the third, outbreaking, outrageous wickedness — the climax 
of sin. 

7. Our fathers understood not thy wonders in Egypt; 
they remembered not the multitude of thy mercies; out 
provoked him at the sea, even at the Red sea. 

" Understood not thy wonders." But it can not possibly be true 
that the Hebrews in bondage did not hear of the plagues on 
Egypt ; did not know that themselves were set free and led out 
through the dry bed of the Red sea; did not understand that God's 
miraculous power wrought these wonders. But it teas true that 
they acted afterward as if they " understood not." The truth they 



434 



PSALM CVI. 



knew, they did not duly realize; would not let it have its due 
place and power on their hearts or in their lives. They held back 
the truth through unrighteousness [Rom. 1: 18]. A heart mind- 
ing the flesh and lusting for worldly good blinded their minds, so 
that practically it was as if they " understood not." For the same 
cause they "remembered not the multitude of his mercies." It 

became easy and natural (alas !) to forget ! These are most 

vital facts pertaining to what we may call the mental laws of 
human sinning — the power which a sin-loving heart has to counter- 
act whatever truth concerning God and duty men may know, an(J 
to make it as if they knew and understood it not. 

8. Nevertheless he saved them for his name's sake, that 
he might make his mighty power to be known. 

Say not (implies the Psalmist) that I overstate their sin or un- 
derstate their righteousness, and that God's saving them proves 
this : for he saved them, not for their righteousness' sake, but of 
his great mercy, for the honor of his name, and to make his great 
power known. The Lord of their covenant was committed before 
the nations as their protector ; salvation for the world was (instru- 
mentally) locked up in their national life ; hence the Lord had 
reasons, apart from their righteousness, for interposing to save 
their nation from extinction. 

9. He rebuked the Bed sea also, and it was dried up : so 
he led them through the depths, as through the wilderness. 

10. And he saved them from the hand of him that 
hated tlwm, and redeemed them from the hand of the en- 
emy., 

11. And the waters covered their enemies: there was not 
one of them left. 

"He rebuked," with his word of command. "Led them 

through the depths " — the deep bed of the sea as if it were over 

the dry sands of the desert. "Not one of them left." The 

history also affirms that this destruction was universal: "There 
remained not so much as one of them." " The sea returned to his 
strength : " they fled before it — but all in vain ! God's awful hand 
was there ! 

12. Then believed they his words ; they sang his praise. 

13. They soon forgat his works ; they waited not for his 
counsel: 

14. But lusted exceedingly in the wilderness, and tempted 
God in the desert. 

15. And he gave them their request ; but sent leanness 
into their soul. 

Then the people believed God's word, and let it be suggested, 
must have, for the moment, " understood his wonders on Egypt." 



PSALM CVI. 



435 



But (v. 13) " they made haste to forget his works," as the express- 
ive Hebrew has it. Their lusts are charged with the responsibility 
of this great sin. More strictly, it was their lustful heart — them- 
selves indulging their lusts. "Waited not for his counsel" — 

where the waiting refers not to time but to trust. It was not so 
much that they would not delay till God moved as that they would 
not wait on him in prayerful trust, asking for what they might 
really need, committing their case to his wise counsel. The 

Hebrew words demand this sense. He sent them quails in 

plenty to eat, but sent leanness into their souls. They filled their 
bodies fatally full : God made their souls fatally lean, The words 
and figures aim to give the statement the force of contrast. It was 
a terrible rebuke to unbridled lust when coupled, as it is wont to 
be, with recklessness of God's authority and unbelief in his care. 

16. They* envied Moses also in the camp, and Aaron 
the saint of the Lord. 

17. The earth opened and swallowed up Dathan, and 
covered the company of Abiram. 

18. And a fire was kindled in their company ; the flame 
burned up the wicked. 

Num. 16, gives in detail the sad but instructive history referred 
to here. 

19. They made a calf in Horeb, and worshiped the 
molten image. 

20. Thus they changed their glory into the similitude of 
an ox that eateth grass. 

The people had become familiar in Egypt with the worship of 
the calf, ox, cow. Hence when in their impatience they thought 
their leader Moses had failed them, they strangely ignored the God 
who had miraculously saved them, and lapsed into the idol-worship 
of their late oppressors. The senseless, revolting wickedness of 
this is forcibly and tersely set forth ; " Thus they changed their 
glory''— the glorious God of their fathers and of their national 
salvation — " into something resembling a grass-eating ox ! " Think 
of it— what a change from the former to the latter ! What infinite 
absurdities they must have swallowed before they could attempt 
such a change, such a substitution ! 

21. They forgat God their savior, which had done great 
things in Egypt ; 

22. Wondrous works in the land of Ham, and terrible 
things by the Ked sea. 

23. Therefore he said that he would destroy them, had 
not Moses his chosen stood before him in the breach, to 
turn away his wrath, lest he should destroy them. 



436 



PSALM CVI. 



Before they could do this, they must have strangely forgotten 
God their Savior. How accurately the sacred writer touches the 
mental process of sinning ! They forgat God. They remembered 
not his merciful salvation. Their passion for sin ruled out of their 

thought the very things they should have thought of. The Lord 

was so grieved, so offended, so discouraged (shall we say ?) with 
this manifestation of ingratitude, forgetfulness, unbelief, that he 
said he would destroy the whole nation, and would have done so 
had not Moses " stood before him in the breach." The historic 
record (Ex. 32) gives a wonderful illustration of intercessory 
prayer. 

24. Yea, they despised the pleasant land, they believed not 
his word: 

25. But murmured in their tents, and hearkened not unto 
the voice of the Lord. 

26. Therefore he lifted up his hand against them, to 
overthrow them in the wilderness : 

The case of the spies (found historically Num. 13 and 14) is 
touched briefly here. The conduct of the ten spies and of the 

masses of the people involved two flagrant sins : (a) They made 

light of Canaan itself though it was really a pleasant land ; and 
(b) They lacked faith in God's word of promise to give them Canaan. 

Their unbelief held God to be a 44 liar." " Lifted up his hand " — 

in the solemn oath — fulfilled by dooming them to wander forty 
years in that desolate wilderness till the sinning generation laid 
their bones there. See notes on Ps. 90 and 95. 

27. To overthrow their seed also among the nations, and 
to scatter them in the lands. 

28. They joined themselves also unto Baalpeor, and ate 
the sacrifices of the dead. 

Subsequent generations, because of like sins, were borne from 
their land into captivity among Gentile nations. This pun- 
ishment God had definitely threatened (Lev. 26: 33, 38 and Deut. 

28.) " They. joined themselves" — made the closest affinity, the 

word used implies. Ate the sacrifices offered to dead things, 

things that never had any life, powerless, senseless. 

29. Thus they provoked Mm to anger with their inven- 
tions ; and the plague brake in upon them. 

30. Then stood up Phineas, and executed judgment : 
and so the plague was stayed. 

31. And that was counted unto him for righteousness unto 
all generations for evermore. 

"Inventions," as usual in the Scriptures, not at all in the me- 
chanical sense, but wholly in the moral one of new devices for 
sinning; here, new gods. "Phineas executed judgment," i. e., 



PSALM CVI. 



437 



executed the Mosaic law -which enjoined summary and extreme 
punishment on every one detected in practices connected with idol- 
atry. The history stands in Num. 25 ; the Mosaic law, Ex. 32 : 

27-29 and Deut. 13. As Phineas distinguished himself in this 

case by his zeal for God, so God distinguished him by the special 
blessing of an "everlasting priesthood" for himself and his pos- 
terity. 

32. They angered him also at the waters of strife, so that 
it went ill with Moses for their sakes : 

33. Because they provoked his spirit, so that he spake 
unadvisedly with his lips. 

The historic facts here referred to implicate Moses. The people 
seemed to lose sight of God's hand in bringing them forth from 
Egypt, and in feeding them by miracle so long, and charged upon 
Moses the responsibility of bringing them into that wilderness to 
perish (Num. 20 ; 3, 4). Moses was exasperated. How much of 
his excited feeling was personal and how much was a pious regard 
for the honor of Jehovah we can not know absolutely, but plainly 
the personal part was quite too great and too strong. The Lord 
said, "Take the rod ; gather the people, thou and Aaron together, 
and speak ye unto the rock before their eyes ; and thou shalt bring 
forth to them water out of the rock," etc. (vs. 8-13). But, this 
once, the meek man Moses " spake unadvisedly." " Hear now, ye 
rebels; must we fetch you water out of this rock?" — The word 
11 we" suggests that Moses had sinfully lost sight of God's hand in 
this matter and was making it selfishly personal, as if the sin of 
the people were against Moses rather than against God, and the 
miraculous power were of his human arm rather than of God's 
.divine arm alone. And then instead of simply "speaking" to the 
rock as the Lord had directed, he lifted up his hand in his strength 
and " smote the rock twice." Ah, he did not honor God, and his 
sin could not be lightly passed over. In Deut. 3 : 23-26, Moses 
gives us the sequel of this case, his prayer that God would let 
him go over and see the goodly land, and the final refusal which 
shut off all further intercession on this point. 

34. They did not destroy the nations, concerning whom 
the Lord commanded them : 

35. But were mingled among the heathen, and learned 
their works. 

36. And they served their idols : which were a snare unto 
them. 

37. Yea, they sacrificed their sons and their daughters 
unto devils, 

38. And shed innocent blood, even the blood of their 
sons and of their daughters, whom they sacrificed unto the 
idols of Canaan : and the land was polluted with blood. 



438 



PSALM CVI. 



The command to exterminate the nations of Canaan rested on 
two main grounds, both indicated in this Psalm as well as in the 
history; viz. (1) Their horrible, murderous sacrifice of their sons 
and daughters to the idols and devils they worshiped: (2) The 
moral certainty that the chosen people, living among them, would 
be ensnared into these gross, abominable idolatries. The land of 
promise was worse than worthless for their inheritance unless the 
Canaanites were expelled. Those nations were superior in the 
arts of civilized life, and were in a position, therefore, to exert a 
dangerous influence on the Hebrew people. Hence the command 
rested at once on the law of self-preservation as to Israel, and on 
the law of righteous retribution as to the Canaanites in view of 
the unendurable barbarities, inevitably begotten of their most cor- 
rupt forms of idol worship. What lower depth of social and moral 
debasement can be conceived of than that which is indicated by 
the murderous sacrifice of sons and daughters to the gods they 
worshiped ? This is not the place to discuss the moral charac- 
ter of God's edict of extermination against the Canaanites. The 
reader who studies attentively the abominations spread out with 
some detail in Lev. 18, giving due attention to vs. 21-28, will have 
the data for comprehending the case. The Lord there represents that 
their extermination was not so much of his arbitrary decree as of 
the very laws of social life and of humanity; "The land itself 
vomiteth out her inhabitants:" a that the land spew not you out 
also when ye defile it, as it spewed out the nations that were before 
you." They were too- rotten, morally and socially, to live. God's 
earth could not bear such awful wickedness. See also Deut. 18: 
9-14, and Gen. 15 : 16. 

39. Thus they were defiled with their own works, and 
went a whoring with their own inventions. 

40. Therefore was the wrath of the Lord kindled against 
his people, insomuch that he abhorred his own inheritance. 

41. And he gave them into the hand of the heathen ; and 
they that hated them ruled over them. 

42. Their enemies also oppressed them, and they were 
brought into subjection under their hand. 

The people seduced by the Canaanites whom they had spared, 
became self-defiled, and were fast becoming as corrupt as their 
corruptors, so that God "abhorred his own inheritance;" and of 
course would not longer protect it against hostile heathen powers. 
The passage seems to look specially'to the portion of Hebrew his- 
tory sketched in the book of Judges. 

43. Many times did he deliver them; but they provoked 
him with their counsel, and were brought low for their in- 
iquity. 

44. Nevertheless he regarded their afflictiou, when he 
heard their cry : 



PSALM CVIL 



439 



45. And he remembered for them his covenant, and re- 
pented according to the multitude of his mercies. 

46 He made them also to be pitied of all those that 
carried them captives. 

The strong point here is that how often soever the people turned 
from their sins and besought God's mercy, he heard and saved. 
This fact was full of hope for the people of the Psalmist's age — 
and of all ages. He who loves to forgive, who is "plenteous in 
mercy to all that call upon him in truth" will surely hear the 
humble, imploring cry of those who penitently seek his mercy. 

47. Save us, O Lord our God, and gather us from 
among the. heathen, to give thanks unto thy holy name, 
a?id to triumph in thy praise. 

The moral force of the whole Psalm culminates in this closing 
prayer. We have sinned with our fathers ; we have been a sin- 
ning nation all along the ages of our national history : let as re- 
pent deeply and most humbly before the God of our national cov- 
enant and beseech him to gather us to our father-land again to 
give thanks to his name and to triumph in his praise. 

48. Blessed be the Lord God of Israel from everlasting 
to everlasting : and let all the people say, Amen. Praise 
ye the Lord. 

The intensive doxology, common at the close of the several orig- 
inal books of Psalms, appears here, probably as part of this 

Psalm, though in place also as the close of this Book IV. 

Whether this call to universal praise presupposes a favorable an- 
swer to the prayer of the verse preceding or not, there was then 
and always is infinite reason for universal and unceasing praise. 
This Book IV is full of those great facts pertaining to the goodness 
and the interposing mercy of God which are for evermore the 
rational ground of praise to the Great Father and Lord of all. 

3>oJ*jKjO« 

PSALM C VII. 

This Psalm commences the fifth and last book of the Psalter. 
There can be no doubt that it was compiled after the restoration 
from exile in Babylon, probably by Ezra and his associates. 

In respect to the authorship of the ninety-four Psalms composing 
this Book V, it may be well to say here in general ; that fifteen 
bear the name of David; viz., Ps. 108-110; 122; 124; 131; 133; 
138-145. One [Ps. 127] is ascribed to Solomon. All the rest are 
anonymous. It may be assumed that these were written by the 
compilers whose modesty withheld their names, and that of course 
they belong properly to the age of the restoration. Of those 



440 



PSALM CVII. 



which bear the name of David, one (Ps. 108) is manifestly made 
up of parts taken from two of his Psalms which appear in the 
earlier books. Whether the others bear his name solely because 
written in imitation of his Psalms ; or as some suppose, because 
written by some king on his throne, of his royal line ; or whether 
they escaped the notice of the compilers of Books I and II but 
subsequently came to light ; or whether they were once included 
in the first two books, but were subsequently transferred to this 
because of their special fitness to these times ; in general, why 
they appear here and not in Book I or II, I doubt if we have 
the means of determining with certainty. The question does not 
at all affect their divine authority and inspiration, and therefore 
has only secondary importance. Much might be said in favor of 
the various hypotheses here suggested; but the data 'for absolute 
certainty seem to me to be wanting. Doubtful speculation would 
be of small profit. 

In Ps. 107, the one leading idea — a call to praise the Lord for 
his mercy and for his wonderful works to men — puts it in the 
closest connection of thought and theme with the four that next 
.precede it, making with them a cluster of fixe praise-Psalms. This 
fact does not prove that they were all written by the same man or 
at the same time. A subsequent author might have written any 
later Psalm and especially this one, having the previous Psalms 
before him and designing to fill out the same comprehensive theme 

with new facts, or with old facts put in new aspects. Vs. 2, 3, 

of this Psalm suffice to locate it after the return from the exile. 
They show that it was composed to celebrate in the songs of the 
sanctuary this signal mercy to their nation. The closing thought 
of Psalm 106, contemplated the people in their political bondage, 
and offered prayer for their deliverance. Fitly this Psalm follows 
immediately, opening the collection made up after the return from 
exile, assuming that the prayer was then answered and called for 

the offering of praise. A little attention to the structure of this 

Psalm will disclose a very peculiar order and method. Four times, 
(viz. vs. 8, 15, 21, 31,) we have what may be called a re/ram, in the 
same words ; " O that men would praise the Lord for his goodness 
and for his wonderful works to the children of men." An equal 
number of times we have with only the slightest variation the 
words — " Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and he 
delivered them out of their distresses," [vs. 6, 13, 19, 28]. Obvi- 
ously the Psalm adduces four distinct cases of affliction, saying 
somewhat the same things of each; viz., (1). Houseless wanderers 
in the desert, hungry, thirsty and faint : (2) Prisoners in bonds : 
(3) men dangerously sick : (4) seafaring men, in storm and life- 
peril. These four sections of the Psalm close respectively with vs. 

9, 16, 22, 32. Now exegetically the main question of the Psalm 

is whether these four cases of affliction are treated independently 
as so many varieties of suffering through which men pass with 
similar experiences of distress, prayer for help," and praises for- 



PSALM CVII. 



441 



redeeming mercy ; or whether they are only different illustrations 

designed to set forth the one great affliction of the recent exile. ■ 

The manner in which they are introduced and spoken of respect- 
ively does not forbid the former supposition ; but the opening and 
closing of the Psalm and its manifest primary reference to the res- 
toration from the exile strongly favor the latter. 

1. O give thanks unto the Lord, for he is good : for his 
mercy endureth forever. 

2. Let the redeemed of the Lord say so, whom he hath 
redeemed from the hand of the enemy ; 

3. ' And gathered them out of the lands, from the east, 
and from the west, from the north, and from the south. 

The first verse gives the scope of the whole song — a call for 

thanks and praise for God's goodness and enduring mercies. ■ 

The " gathering out of all lands," can be applied justly to nothing 

less than the great restoration from Babylon and the East. The 

last word in v. 3 translated " the south " is strictly the sea. 

4. They wandered in the wilderness in a solitary way : 
they found no city to dwell in. 

5. Hungry and thirsty, their soul fainted in them. 

6. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and 
he delivered them out of their distresses. 

7. And he led them forth by the right way, that they 
might go to a city of habitation. 

This seems to be a description of the weary journeyings of the 
captives, torn away from home and country. In their extreme dis- 
tress they cried to God for help. In due time he heard and saved. 

8. Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, 
and for his wonderful works to the children of men ! 

9. For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hun- 
gry soul with goodness. 

The refrain calls appropriately for praise in view of this great 
mercy ; while v. 9 follows with the reasons in brief for this offering 
of praise. 

10. Such as sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, 
being bound in affliction and iron ; 

11. Because they rebelled against the words of God, and 
contemned the counsel of the Most High : 

12. Therefore he brought down their heart with labor ; 
they fell down, and there was none to help. 

13. Then they cried unto the Lord in their trouble, and 
he saved them out of their distresses. 



442 



PSALM CVIL 



14. He brought them out of darkness and the shadow of 
death, and brake their bands in sunder. 

15. Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, 
and for his wonderful works to the children of men ! 

16. For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the 
bars of iron in sunder. 

On the whole I prefer to consider these verses as suggesting a 
new illustration of the case of the exiles. They were captives, and 

figuratively if not literally were in bonds. It should be noted 

that the song shows that the reason of this affliction was the great 
sin of the people. They rebelled against God's word and con- 
temned his counsel. The book of Jeremiah discloses this fact 
most fully and painfully. 

17. Fools, because of their transgression, and because of 
their iniquities, are afflicted. 

18. Their soul abhorreth all mauner of meat; and they 
draw near unto the gates of death. 

19. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and 
he saveth them out of their distresses. 

20. He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered 
them from their destructions. 

21. Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, 
and for his wonderful works to the children of men ! 

. 22. And let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, 
and declare his w T orks with rejoicing. 

Personal sickness, utter loss of appetite and strength, afford 
another illustration of their case. Sin as the antecedent cause 

stands at the head of this showing. In v. 17, "are afflicted" 

should have the reciprocal sense — afflict themselves — bring affliction 
upon themselves by their own act. 

23. They that go down to the sea in ships, that do busi- 
ness in great waters ; 

24. These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders 
in the deep. 

25. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, 
which lifteth up the waves thereof. 

Seafaring men are sometimes in straits. Their case, most 

graphically described, affords another illustration. In v. 24, 

" These see," the first word is made in Hebrew especially em- 
phatic : these, if none others ; these perhaps more than any others, 

see the works and wonders of the Lord. Note here, it is God's 

simple word that raiseth the storm and lifteth high the waves of 
the sea. 



PSALM cvn. 



443 



26. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again 
to the depths : their soul is melted because of trouble. 

27. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken 
man, and are at their wit's end. 

This description of shipmen in a storm is classic in all lan- 
guages. Now they are borne up to the heaven on the mountain 
wave; now pitched down to the depths as if they were going 
into the very bowels of the earth; reeling, swaying; and their 
wisdom swallowed up [Hebrew], 

28. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and 
he bringeth them out of their distresses. 

29. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves 
thereof are still. 

30. Then are they glad because they be quiet ; so he 
bringeth them unto their desired haven. 

31. Oh that men would praise the Lord for his good- 
ness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men ! 

32. Let them exalt him also in the congregation of the 
people, and praise him in the assembly of the elders. 

Then, O how they cry to God for help ! Men that never prayed 
before, skeptics who had scorned all faith in prayer, are on their 

knees in supplication. God hears and saves. In v. 30, they, 

the men of the sea, are glad because, not themselves, but the 
waves, are quiet again. Now let them gather in the great as- 
sembly with public praise for God's delivering mercies. 

33. He turneth rivers into a wilderness, and the water- 
springs into dry ground ; 

34. A fruitful land into barrenness, for the wickedness 
of them that dwell therein. 

35. He turneth the wilderness into a standing water, and 
dry ground into water-springs. 

36. And there he maketh the hungry to dwell, that they 
may prepare a city for habitation ; 

37. And sow the fields, and plant vineyards, which may 
yield fruits of increase. 

38. He blesseth them also, so that they are multiplied 
greatly ; and suffereth not their cattle to decrease. 

39. Again, they are minished, and brought low through 
oppression, affliction, and sorrow. 

The central idea here is that God has such absolute control over 
the realm of nature that he can utterly reverse its course, and so 
reverse the circumstances of our lot ; changing rivers to dryness ; 
the fruitful land to barrenness ; or again, the drought to copious 



444 



PSALM CVIII. 



waterings, and the barren soil to exuberant fertility. All is in 
his hand. 

40. He poureth contempt upon princes, and causeth them 
to wander in the wilderness, where there is no way. 

41. Yet setteth he the poor on high from affliction, and 
maketh him families like a flock. 

So, also, high station and great power as men count things great, 
can not save the wicked from his judgments. He can lay princes 
low, and exalt the poor to a state of manifold blessings. 

42. The righteous shall see it, and rejoice : and all in- 
iquity shall stop her mouth. 

43. Whoso is wise, and will observe these things, even 
they shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord. 

Such great facts in God's rule in nature and providence bring 
joy to his trustful, obedient people, and shut the mouth of all the 
wicked. It was God's purpose — pre-eminently so in the early ages 
of our world — to rule so that observing men should certainly see 
that there is a God — a God who rules in righteousness and awards 

retribution — evil on the wicked — blessings upon the just. Let 

men open their eyes and observe God's ways ; so they will surely 
see his loving-kindness to his people ; and his indignation against 
the wicked. 

PSALM CVIII. 

This Psalm, ascribed to David, is made up of two selections from 
Psalms of David found in Book IT. Vs. 1-5 appear in almost 
identical words in Ps. 57: 8-12; while vs. 6-12, in like manner, 
stand in Ps. 60 : 5-12. The first selection expresses in strongest 
terms the writer's consecration of heart to God and also his spirit 
of praise and adoration : the second implores divine help against 
combined national enemies, coupled with strong assurance of vic- 
tory through the arm of God alone. The combination of these 
two selections suggests that whenever the king and his people 
have the spirit of the first selection, they may be sure of the re- 
sults indicated in the last. Thus understood, the Psalm in this 
form became every way pertinent to the restored Jews in the time 

of Nehemiah in their relations to their national enemies. Some 

critics suppose that this Psalm in its present form was made up 
by David himself, late in his life. It seems to me more probable that 
the making up, by selection as above shown, was done by Ezra, 

or the men of his time. The two portions that compose this 

Psalm having been commented on in their place, it only remains 
to note the variations between the texts here and there. 



PSALM CV1II. 



445 



1. O God, my heart is fixed; I will sing and give praise, 
even with my glory. 

2. Awake, psaltery and harp : I myself will awake early. 

3. I will praise thee, O Lord, among the people : and I 
will sing praises unto thee among the nations. 

4. For thy mercy is great above the heavens : and thy 
truth reacheth unto the clouds. 

5. Be thou exalted, O God, above the heavens : and thy 
glory above all the earth ; 

In Ps. 57 David repeats the words, "my heart is fixed," hut 
omits " even with my glory." But in the verses corresponding to 
our v. 2 he repeats the word "awake " (not repeated here), and 
then introduces "my glory." These may be taken as samples of 
the variations — all practically unimportant, yet sufficing to show 
that the transcription of the one into the other did not secure, 
perhaps did not attempt, perfect accuracy. The thought was 
more cared for than the words; the words more than their pre- 
cise order. 

6. That thy beloved may be delivered : save with thy right 
hand, and answer me. 

7. God hath spoken in his holiness ; I will rejoice, I will 
divide Shechem, and mete out the valley of Succoth. 

8. Gilead -is^mine ; Manasseh is mine; Ephraim also is 
the strength of mine head ; Judah is my lawgiver ; 

9. Moab is my washpot ; over Edom will I cast out my 
shoe; over Philistia will I triumph. 

10. Who will bring me into the strong city? who will 
lead me into Edom ? 

11. Wilt not thou, O God, who hast cast us off? and wilt 
not thou, O God, go forth with our hosts? 

12. Give us help from trouble : for vain is the help of 
man. 

13. Through God we shall do valiantly : for he it is that 
shall tread down our enemies. 

The most considerable variations in the entire Psalm occur in 
v. 9; here, "over Philistia will I triumph;" in Ps. 60, "Philistia, 
triumph thou because of me," or by a better translation, " Tri- 
umph thou over me," which may be either ironical, or it may take 
this turn : Triumph thou in the general joy over my victory. The 
passage, as it stands in Ps. 108, gives the true sense in no ambig- 
uous words. 



446 



PSALM CIX. 



PSALM CIX. 

This Psalm is ascribed to David, and has strong affinities with other 
Psalms of his ; e. g., Ps. 35, and 58 and 69. It is customarily placed at 
the head of the class called " the Imprecatory Psalms," distinguished 
for their imprecations of judgment upon the wicked. The pas- 
sages of this character in the Psalm before us are remarkable 

for extent, variety of phrase, and intensity (vs. 6-20, 28, 29). 

If we may suppose that David's thought is chiefly upon some 
one individual enemy, it may have been Saul, or Absalom, or 
Ahithophel. Ezra and Nehemiah, taking up this Psalm from 
David's hand, and virtually making it their own by placing it in 
their collection, may have had their eye on Sanballat the Horon- 

ite (Neh. 6 : 1-14). The work of the commentator on this 

Psalm is in two parts: (1) To explain special words and phrases; 
(2) To put in its true light the subject (perplexing to many) of ini- 

{)recations upon the wicked. Some remarks on the latter point 
lave been made above in notes on Ps. 35 and 58 and 69 : 27, 28. 

1. Hold not thy peace, O God of my praise ; 

2. For the mouth of the wicked and the mouth of the 
deceitful are opened against me : they have spoken against 
me with a lying tongue. 

3. They compassed me about also with words of hatred ; 
and fought against me without a cause. 

A child of God under rancorous persecution cries to his Father 
for help. Great stress is laid upon the slanderous and false 
charges with which they sought his ruin. The same point is 
prominent throughout the Psalms which treat of Saul's persecu- 
tion. "God of my praise" — thou God whom it has been my 

joy to praise in sacred song. 

4. For my love they are my adversaries: but I give my- 
self unto prayer. 

In requital for my love to them, they play the part of Satan 
against me. The Hebrew for " my adversaries " is a verb— the 

same from which the word Satan is derived. The last clause 

is strikingly concise : "but I .... . prayer." As for me, my heart 
is all prayer. I cry to God for help constantly, to strengthen me 
against temptation and shield me from this hot and malign perse- 
cution. Christians have need, under such circumstances, to pray 
without ceasing that God would help them keep their heart right. 
Let us believe that this Avas one chief point in David's perpetual 
prayer. 

5. Aud they have rewarded me evil for good, and hatred 
for my love. 

This was true of either Saul or Absalom as toward David. It 



PSALM CIX. 



447 



is in human nature, however much sanctified, to feel deeply aggrieved 
by such requital of evil for good. It is simply impossible that the 
heart should not be pained by such ingratitude and shocked by 
such wickedness. Such sin calls loudly for retribution, and all 
the elements in the character of God compel him to hear the call. 
Let it not surprise us that his people, sympathizing with him, have 
a like sense of the fitness of retribution for such sin. 

6. Set tliou a wicked man over him ; and let Satan stand 
at his right hand. 

The Hebrew word for " Satan " means an adversary — one who 
hates and seeks to harm. The position at the right hand, for him, 

is that of an accuser. See Zech. 3 : 1 and Rev. 12 : 10. The 

sentiment is : Let him who acts the part of Satan toward me know 
in his own case what it is to have a Satan at his right hand, over 

him, with the heart to hate and the power to harm. The second 

verb is in form future, raising the important question whether it 
is mere prediction or prayer. In Hebrew the future form is some- 
times imperative, and is normally so when preceded, as here, by 
an imperative. The future forms continue mostly onward to the 
end of v. 11, this first imperative ("Set thou ") throwing its influ- 
ence over the whole passage. 

7. When he shall be judged, let him be condemned: 
and let his prayer become sin. 

When he shall be judged, let him go forth from the court a 
condemned man, and let his prayer to the court for mercy be a 
failure — miss its aim, is the original sense of the Hebrew word. 

8. Let his days be few ; and let another take his office. 

This individual enemy is assumed to be in some position of re- 
sponsibility. The Psalmist prays that he may die soon, and a 
better man take his official place. The Apostle Peter (Ac. 1 : 20) 
applies this to the traitor Judas. The words were pertinent to his 
case and therefore chosen. 

9. Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. 

10. Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg : 
let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places. 

By the laws of nature and by the constitution of society it is 
almost inevitable that children suffer because of the sins of their 
parents, not however by direct but by indirect retribution. The 
direct retribution involved in their suffering is upon the parent. 
It goes to embitter the dregs of his cup. 

11. Let the extortioner catch all that he hath ; and let 
the strangers spoil his labor. 

" Catch as with a snare " — by cunning arts. " His labor " here 



448 



PSALM CIX. 



represents the fruit of his labor, both ideas, labor, and the fruit 
thereof, being included in the same Hebrew word. 

12. Let there be none to extend mercy unto him : neither 
let there be any to favor his fatherless children. 

13. Let his posterity be cut off ; and in the generation 
following let their name be blotted out. 

Both verbs in v. 12, and in the first in v. 13, are in the apocopate 
form which by usage demands the optative, imperative construction. 
Future forms come after, but by the laws of the language, must 
follow the strain of the verb that precedes. 

14. Let the iniquity of his fathers be remembered with 
the LoPwD ; and let not the sin of his mother be blotted out. 

15. Let them be before the Lord continually, that he 
may cut off the memory of them from the earth. 

16. Because that he remembered not to show mercy, but 
persecuted the poor and needy man, that he might even slay 
the broken in heart. 

V. 16 assigns the reason: Because they would show no mercy, 
let no mercy be shown them. Because they chased down (Hebrew) 
the afflicted and heart-broken, even to slaughter, let their retribu- 
tion be just and thorough, following their name and their posterity 

till their memory is blotted from the earth. These conceptions — 

a sinner punished in his posterity; punished also by the sin of his 
father and of his mother coming down upon him — are deeply 
tinged with the oriental character. They are peculiar, not merely 
as being terribly strong, but as involving the sentiment that a man 
lives in the glory of his ancestry and in the glory of his posterity, 
and therefore his punishment may be knit together with theirs. 

17. As he loved cursing, so let it come unto him : as he 
delighted not in blessing, so let it be far from him. 

18. As he clothed himself with cursing like as with his 
garment, so let it come into his bowels like water, and like 
oil into his bones. 

A close and faithful adherence to the legitimate sense of the 
original is the first duty of the commentator, whether the result 
be or be not to his taste. I have sought to follow this rule in the 
verses above, where the imperative and apocopated forms of the 
verb demanded the construction of prayer as distinct from predic- 
tion. Now we come upon grammatical forms (in vs. 17, 18) which 
are simply historical, and not at all imperative or optative, i. e., 
which are not prayer, nor even prediction. The only proper ren- 
dering is on this wise: "And he even loved cursing, and conse- 
quently [or, then] it came upon him ; and he did not love blessing, 
and consequently it kept aloof from him. He even put on cursing 



PSALM CIX. 



449 



as his long outer robe, and consequently it came like water into 

his bowels and like oil into his bones." "Loved cursing" — 

loved to curse others; therefore cursing came with terrible power 
upon him. He had no love of conferring blessings; therefore 
blessings did not love to come near him. As he lived in an atmos- 
phere of cursing (we might say), but the oriental mind puts it — he 
girt it about him as his robe, therefore he had his fill of it, as 
water might fill his stomach and oil his bones. That is, God has 
impressed the law of retribution, (1) upon the soul of man so that 

it helps to work out this result; (2) upon human society so that 

man's social nature and relations help forward this result; and 

(3) upon the agencies of his own providential government so that 
they bring up toward completeness and fullness the results of righte- 
ous and terrible retribution. " Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall 
he also reap." The historic fact is the thing affirmed in these 
verses. 

19. Let it be unto him as the garment which covereth 
him, and for a girdle wherewith he is girded continually. 

20. Let this be the reward of mine adversaries from the 
Lord, and of them that speak evil against my soul. 

Here the first verb is an apocopated form, of which the proper 
translation is : "Be this to him as a garment that shall invest him, 
and for a girdle which he shall gird about himself continually. 
This the reward of my haters from the Lord," etc. In v. 20 we 
have no verb expressed, and must normally supply the next pre- 
ceding one. The sentiment is — Let all the influences and agencies 
that work out retribution for sin take effect upon the wicked men 
who have slandered me and sought my ruin. — —The moral quality 
of this state of mind under his circumstances will be considered 
at the close of the Psalm. 

21. But do thou for me, O God the Lord, for thy name's 
sake : because thy mercy is good, deliver thou me. 

22. For I am poor and needy, and my heart is wounded 
within me. 

The sudden transition is strongly indicated by the emphatic 
" Thou" at the head of the sentence. But all unlike my wicked 
haters, Thou, 0 Lord my God, art my Refuge ; show mercy to me ; 
execute, do, by thine interposing arm, for thy name's sake. The 
grounds of his plea are (1) God's great and good mercy ; (2) His 

own utter weakness, and his smitten, suffering state. " My heart 

wounded," pierced as with daggers. 

23. I am gone like the shadow w T hen it declineth : I am 
tossed up and down as the locust. 

As shadows far stretched out soon go utterly from view, so I 
am almost gone. The tossing up and down of the locust alludes 



450 



PSALM CIX. 



to the strong winds which were God's agents in nature for driving 
them away upon seas or other lands. 

24. My knees are weak through fasting; and my flesh 
faileth of fatness. 

Perhaps his afflictions from persecuting enemies were aggravated 
by wasting sickness or the infirmities of age, as in the times of 
Adonijah. "Flesh faileth of fatness; " becomes lean, emaciated. 

25. I became also a reproach unto them : when they 
looked upon me they shaked their heads. 

26. Help me, O Lord my God : O save me according to 
thy mercy : 

27. That they may know that this is thy hand ; that thou, 
Lord, hast done it. 

The word " I " is made emphatic here by writing the pronoun 
as in the case of "Thou" (v. 21). As for me, I became a butt of 
ridicule to them ; they will look at me and will wag the head " — 

these verbs being future. "Save me according to thy mercy" 

[which will surely be a great and notable salvation], "and they 
ivill know " [future] ; they can not fail to know — " that this is thy 
hand " etc. He longs to have God's interposing hand in his 
deliverance so signally conspicuous that they shall surely see it, 
and shall know that God approves the right as warmly as he 
abhors the wrong. 

28. Let them curse, but bless thou : when they arise, let 
them be ashamed ; but let thy servant rejoice. 

" 29. Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame ; and let 
them cover themselves with their own confusion as with a 
mantle. 

It is better here to translate with grammatical precision, on 
this wise : " They will curse, but Thou wilt bless: they have risen 
up" [as mine enemies,] "and consequently were confounded; but 
thy servant" [myself, because I am thy servant] "will rejoice. 
My haters will be clothed with shame; they will cover themselves 
with their own disgrace as with a mantle.'" 

30. I will greatly praise the Lord with my mouth ; yea, 
I will praise him among the multitude. 

31. For he shall stand at the right hand of the poor, to 
save him from those that condemn his soul. 

The tenses throughout these verses are future, as they were 
throughout vs. 28, 29. Here [not there] our English version has 

rendered them accurately.- The sentiment — 1 will praise the 

Lord, my Deliverer, with voice and tongue and before the great 
congregation, because I know he will stand for the help of the 
innocent, defenseless ones, to save them from their mortal foes. 



PSALM CIX. 



451 



It now remains to speak of the imprecations in this Psalm — 
those passages which invoke punishments or judgments upon the 

wicked. The attentive reader will have noticed that in my 

view our English version gives the imprecatory sense in several 
passages where the original does not. With all respect for those 
excellent men, I marvel that they should have erred on that side. 
I do not wonder that they should stand squarely and firmly up to 
the demands of the original tongue ; but only that they should 
have gone beyond those demands. The true mission of the trans- 
lator as of the expositor is to meet those demands with the utmost 
possible precision, it being the function of God only to speak the 
word; of his servants, honestly to interpret. There is real im- 
precation in this Psalm, and we are now to inquire into its moral 
character considered as the utterance of the author : Is it, or is it 
not, consistent with Christian love, with the spirit of the gospel of 
Christ? The subject has broad applications; e. g., to the ques- 
tion, Will the holy in heaven acquiesce in the punishment of 
the wicked in hell — even the saved father in the doom of a son in- 
corrigibly wicked and hopelessly lost ? 

The solution of this great question turns on a power of mind 
common to all intelligent moral agents by which we are able to 
contemplate any other moral agent variously, holding him before 
our mind, now in one light, now in another, according to the feat- 
ures which are prominent in his case, as thus : We are able to 
love the man and hate the sinner; to love him thought of as man; 
but to hate, not his conduct only but himself, its responsible 
author, thought of simply as a destroyer of other's happiness. 
Thinking of him as a sentient being, capable of happiness and of 
misery, we desire his happiness, we deprecate his misery; but 
thinking of him as the deliberate and sworn foe and destroyer of 
all happiness, even to his utmost power, we wish and pray that 
God's retribution may seize upon him, arrest his career of mis- 
chief, and make his sufferings exemplary for the restraint of others 
like-minded toward evil. The traitor in arms against his country 
we shoot down and spare not: the same rebel, wounded, disarmed, 
and at our mercy, we spare and lift up as swiftly as we smote 
him when in arms. Thinking of man as a fellow-creature, as one 
whose sensibilities to joy or woe are like our own, we love his 
welfare and mourn over his fall; but thinking of him as the enemy 
of God, as the determined foe of all real, high, and noble blessed- 
ness in the universe, our indignation is bound to rise against him ; 
we can not suppress it ; we are false to the highest interests of 
truth and right if we disapprove or restrain it. " Do not I hate 
them, O God, who hate thee ? 1 hate them with perfect hatred ; I 
count them not thine enemies only, but mine." [Ps. 139: 21, 22.] 

Assuming now that David wrote this Psalm and had his eye 

on Saul or Ahithophel as the "Satan," the malign enemy, seeking 
to break down his reputation by lies and to take his life by vio- 
lence, it is quite vital to our main question to ask — Did David hate 



452 



PSALM CIX. 



Saul as a man, or did he simply withstand him in self-defense, and 
abhor his murderous spirit as intrinsically base and therefore 
worthy of reprobation? Did he hate Ahithophel, thought of sim- 
ply as a fellow-being ; or rather, did he detest his treachery and 
ingratitude, and execrate his base plots against his life-long friend 

and benefactor? The history gives a beautiful record as to 

David's spirit toward Saul. Once and again, while in armed pur- 
suit of David and bent on his death, he fell into David's power, yet 
only to bring out the noble magnanimity and the pure benevolence 
of David's heart toward him. And when he fell slain on Mt. Gil- 
boa, no heart in all Israel bemoaned his fate more deeply than 
David's. It would almost seem that this touching narrative (2 
Sam. 1 :) was put on record to help us interpret these impreca- 
tory Psalms of David; i. e., to show that, personally, David's heart 
was nobly generous and singularly exempt from all malign feeling 
toward his worst public enemies. But thinking of Saul, as sel- 
fishly, madly, malignly bent on taking his life, and for this end 
upon destroying his good name first, he could not do less than 
withstand him ; nay more, he could not do less than reprobate his 
wicked spirit. David had a right to live and he knew it. God 
had a right to call him to the throne of Israel, and David had 
really no right to decline the call. Hence God was with David 
and David was (in sympathy) with God in the measures taken to 
plant David in due time upon that throne. The enemies to this 
measure were at once the enemies of David and of God. Viewed 
as such enemies, David ought to pray for their defeat and for their 
just punishment. His case illustrates the broad principle that it 
is within our power as moral beings to love a fellow-creature con- 
sidered simply as such, while we detest and hate him for his an- 
tagonism against God and against others' happiness. We love him 
as sentient, but hate him as wicked ; love him in view of his per- 
sonal happiness ; but hate him in view of his guilty hostility to 

others' happiness, his hostility to God and to all that is good. 

If now this distinction has been made plain to the reader, he will 
see its bearing upon the moral attitude of all the holy in heaven 
toward the lost in their eternal doom. The necessity and- the re- 
sponsibilities of civil government in this world of crime furnish 
apt illustration. The men of largest, purest benevolence are the 
best men to frame criminal law; the best men to administer it 
from the bench ; the best men to execute it in prison, in peniten- 
tiary, or upon the scaffold. Solemnly and firmly, with tender 
compassion, yet with unflinching fidelity, they may love the cul- 
prit, but they must inflict the penalty he deserves. In the right- 
eous demands of law they acquiesce simply because there is a 
greater good behind which must be protected by the lesser sacri- 
fice of the guilty criminal. Under the stress of a necessity which 
they deplore, they say from the bottom of their heart — The guilty 
man must die; we should deprecate his escape; in behalf of all 
society and of universal good, we feel a sense of relief when jus- 



PSALM CX. 



453 



tice exacts the murderer's life — blood for blood. The tribunal 

of the Supreme Judge of the universe differs from this only as 
being perfect and universal. Justice is the same thing there as 
here. Benevolence is the same. The ultimate question, there- 
fore, is reduced to this : Shall God reign, or shall Satan ? Shall 
the right triumph, or the wrong? Shall the innocent be pro- 
tected, or the guilty ; the good in heart, or the evil ? And to our 
present point — rWhere shall our sympathies be ; with God, or 
with his enemies ? This»is the ultimate question, beyond which 
we have no occasion to go. 

PSALM CX. 

This Psalm, short but rich in thought, is ascribed to David. It 
bears the impress of the same hand which wrote Ps. 2, and is 
fitly considered its counterpart. As there the Messiah was set 
forth as a conqueror, subduing all his foes and receiving the na- 
tions as his inheritance, so here he rules over his enemies, sub- 
dues the kings of the nations, and especially, bears the office of 
priest as well as king. This latter is additional to what we have 
in Ps. 2 — a step in advance in the progress of doctrine in respect 
to the person and work of the Great Messiah. It appears in the 
later prophet Zechariah (6: 13), and may be foreshadowed in 

Isa. 53. This Psalm is applied to the Messiah by the Jewish 

fathers ; by the very early Syriac version in the words : " A pro- 
phecy of Christ's victory over his enemies " ; and, higher than all 
other testimony, by Jesus himself (Mat. 22: 41, and Mk. 12: 35, 
and Lk. 20: 41). These passages show that the Jews of that age 
recognized their expected Messiah in this Psalm, and also that 
Jesus applied the Psalm to himself in an argument which none of 

his opponents could resist. Furthermore, the New Testament 

writers repeatedly recognize and honor this Psalm as referring to 
Christ by their application to him of the words, " Sit at my right 
hand." No special emphasis should be given to the word "sit" 
as compared with any other posture; position at the right hand 
is the main thing. Hence Stephen saw him " standing at the 
right hand of God" (Ac. 7: 56), and Paul (Rom. 8: 34) has it 
simply, "is at the right hand," etc. Sitting, however, is the usual 
posture of royalty ; a king sits on his throne. See other New 
Testament references, in Mat. 26 : 64, and Eph. 1 : 20, and Heb. 
1 : 3, 13 and 8 : 1, and 10: 12, and 1 Pet. 3 : 22, and Rev. 3 : 21. 
Another corresponding class of New Testament passages in- 
dorses the words, "make thine enemies thy footstool;" e. g.,1 

Cor. 15 : 25, and Eph. 1 : 22, and Heb. 10 : 13. To these should 

be added the strong support given to the Messianic interpreta- 
tion of this Psalm by the allusion to his priesthood as taught 
here in v. 4. The writer to the Hebrews makes this point strik- 
ingly emphatic (Heb. 5: 6-10, and 6: 20, and 7: and 8). In- 
20 



454 



PSALM CX. 



deed chapters 7 and 8 are a full discourse upon this v. 4 as 
the text, amplifying the subject in its numerous bearings. Noth- 
ing more need be said to sustain the Messianic character of 
this Psalm, or to show its commanding place in the gospel sys- 
tem of doctrine concerning Jesus Christ. Yet the subject would 
not be exhausted short of a careful comparison of numerous New 
Testament passages which assert another of the grand senti- 
ments of this Psalm, viz., the ultimate victory of King Messiah 
over all his enemies — a fact which appears frequently in the Epis- 
tles, but nowhere in more majestic outlines than in the Revelation 
of John. 

1. The Lord said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right 
hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool. 

" The Lord [Hebrew] Jehovah. The Hebrew word for 

" saith " is used only for prophetic declarations : literally, the 
announcement of Jehovah; the thiDg prophetically foretold. See 
Jer. 23: 30, 31, which shows that the false prophets stole this 
phrase from the true prophets, and thereby incurred the Lord's 

special indignation. u Unto my Lord" — who yet was David's 

Son. That the Messiah was David's Son is not affirmed in this 
Psalm, but was earliest foretold in 2 Sam. 7, and often thence- 
forward ; was wrought into the entire web of Hebrew genealogy, 
and appears prominently in prophecy, e. g., Isa. 11 : 1, 10, and 
Jer. 23 : 5 and 30 : 9, and Ezek. 34 : 23, 24, and 37 : 24, 25, and 
Hos. 3: 5. There is not the least doubt that this was the well 
understood faith of the Jews in our Savior's time. The argu- 
ment of our Savior with the Jews turns upon the sentiment, ever 
held in honor among the patriarchal people, that terms of high re- 
spect, reverence, and authority, were appropriately used by sons 
of their fathers, but not by fathers of their sons. How then should 
David call one who was his Son his Lord ? This argument of our 
Savior was a claim to a nature higher than human, of which Ps. 2 
was explicit prophetic authority. Jehovah said to him, "Thou art 

my Son" ! " Sit thou at my right hand." The right hand being 

a natural emblem of power, to be near the right hand of one strong 
to save implies assured protection. The Psalms abound in cases 
foiling under this principle ; e. g., Ps. 109 : 31 — " For he [God] 
shall stand at the ri^ht hand of the poor to save," etc. Also Ps. 
16 : 8, " Because he "[the Lord] is at my right hand, I shall not be 

moved." Also Ps. 73 : 23, and 121 : 5. But the passage before 

us means more than this. Sitting here supposes a throne and the 
sitting is that of a king, of one enthroned in equal majesty and 
honor. The Messiah is not there to be personally protected, but 
to be invested with the purple of the heavenly kingdom, to reign 
jointly with the Father. "Until I make thine enemies thy foot- 
stool " — the Almighty arm being pledged to this result, and the 
promise good till it shall be achieved. What is beyond and after 

this result is not said here. That complete subjugation lies in 

this figure — " thine enemies thy footstool " seems to come from the 



PSALM CX. 



455 



usages of ancient warfare, of which we have traces in Josh. 10 : 
24, and Isa. 26: 6, and Mai. 4: 3. 

2. The Lord shall send the rod of thy strength out of 
Zion : rule thou in the midst of thine enemies. 

"Kod," an instrument for chastising, an emblem of power. 
Here the phrase means — Thy strong rod. Its " going forth from 
Zion" indicates either that Zion had been, under the ancient 
economy, the place of God's visible abode — the God revealed 
under that economy being no other than the Eternal Son ; or that 
his militant people would go forth from Zion, soldiers in his mar- 
tial campaign. The latter seems most in harmony with the strain 

of the passage. The "ruling" expressed by the Hebrew word 

here contemplates force in the subjection of enemies. 

3. Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power, in 
the beauties of holiness from the womb of the morning : 
thou hast the dew of thy youth. 

Nothing could be more foreign from the true sense of these 
words than the assumption, sometimes made, that this force is 
exerted upon his people to bring them into obedience. The real 
meaning of the clause is the very opposite of this. "Thy people 
shall be free-will offerings, like that class of offerings under the 
Mosaic law which were required by no vow and by no specific 

statute, but were offered by any pious Israelite spontaneously. 

"Day of thy power" is no other than the day of thy going forth 
to war against thy foes — martial power being the exact sense of 
the word. Thy people shall be volunteers in the day of thy war 

against thine enemies. " In the beauties of holiness " means 

primarily in holy garments, like those of the priesthood. Yet the 
ultimate sense is doubtless — with holy hearts, with spirits conse- 
crated and devoted in love and sincerity to their Lord. The 

principal pause of the verse should come in here rather than after 

the word "morning." All critics acknowledge difficulties in the 

last half of this verse. Undeniably we have here the bold but 
beautiful poetic conception that the morning brings forth as from 
its womb the dew — an emblem of freshness, vigor, and beauty. 
Then the choice lies between these two constructions: (1) Taking 
"-youth" to mean young men, and giving the word for "from" its 
very common sense — more than — we have this construction and 
meaning : More than the dew-drops of the morning are the vigor- 
ous young men of thy martial hosts. (2) Taking " youth " in its 

usual sense, and referring it to the Messiah himself, we have this : 
As by the dew from the womb of morning, thy youth is sustained 

evermore in its freshness and beauty. Of the best critics, some 

favor the one and some the other of these two constructions. The 
former has for its support that it holds the same subject before 
the mind throughout the verse — the Messiah's people, ready, strong, 
and in countless hosts for his spiritual warfare : also that the com- 



456 



PSALM CX. 



parison of a multitudinous army to the fallen dewdrops is not 
unknown to the Hebrew mind. (See 2 Sam. 17: 12). The latter 
has for its chief support the more common usage of the word 

" youth." The former has my preference. All this looks 

toward the certain and glorious victory of King Messiah over his 
foes, and gives us a glowing view of the marshaled hosts of his 
people, prompt, cheerfully ready, and eager for the conflict; going 
forth in the beauties of inward holiness ; countless in number, and 
clothed in the freshness and beauty of youthful strength evermore 
renewed like the eagle's by waiting in humble faith on their Lord. 

4. The Lord hath sworn, and will not repent, Thou art 
a priest forever after the order of Melchizedek. 

The allusion to the " holy garments " worn by his people 
[" beauties of holiness "] seems to have suggested the great idea 
of this verse — the perpetual priesthood of the Messiah. The re- 
markable fact of his character is that he is at once Priest and King. 
Neither function interferes with the other; both are held and 
exercised in their perfection. A Priest — himself the one great 
sacrifice; and this having been made once for all, then ascending 
on high and ever living to be the Mediator and High Priest of his 
people : — such are the staple facts in this class of his functions as 
given in the epistle to the Hebrews [chap. 7], developed there from 
this prophecy as its text. But together with these functions of the 
priest, he is also and none the less a Mighty King, clothed with 
all requisite power, marshaling the hosts of his conquering 

army, and certain of complete anal glorious victory. " After the 

order of Melchizedek," who seems to have been both priest and 
king. (See Gen. 14: 18-20). He had moreover this other pecul- 
iarity — that unlike the lineal priesthood of Aaron, running from 
father to son through long successive generations, he stands one 
and alone, the record giving no word as to his ancestry or pos- 
terity — no light as to his birth or his death. Strictly by the record, 
he stands before us " without beginning of days or end of years " — 
lit emblem, therefore, of Christ's everlasting priesthood. 

5. The Lord at thy right hand shall strike through kings 
in the day of his wrath. 

The appearance of solecism in placing both Father and Son 
each at the right hand of the other, will be obviated by assuming 
that the words in v. 1 and here are only figurative, indicating 
rather their mutual relations than their position in reference to 
each other. The diversity in phrase is apparently due to the 
change of speaker. In v. 1, the Father addresses the Son. In v. 
5 the Psalmist speaks. "The Lord at thy right hand" means 

only — The Jehovah who befriends and sustains Thee. " Shall 

strike through kings," and by implication, their subjects no less. No 
opposing power can withstand him. Nations shall be subdued to 



PSALM CXI. 



457 



Messiah's scepter. As said in Ps. 2; "Ask of me, and I will give 
thee the heathen" [the nations] "for thine inheritance." 

6. He shall judge among the heathen, he shall fill the 
places with the dead bodies ; he shall wound the heads over 
many countries. 

7. He shall drink of the brook in the way: therefore 
shall he lift up the head. 

" Shall judge " — in his exalted functions as universal King and 
Lord. His foes fall in slaughtered heaps, over vast countries. 
This carries out the conception of deadly war — the figure here, as 
in Ps. 2, being taken from the martial life of King David. How 
far the ultimate thought is physical destruction of enemies, and how 
far their spiritual subjection by the power of truth and love, Ave 
could not determine absolutely from these Psalms alone ; but arc 
thrown upon other collateral prophecies for the light we need 
upon this question. A store-house of explanatory truth on this 
point may be found in Isaiah; witness chap. 9 : 1-7, and 11 : 1-10, 

42: 1-7, and 55: 6-13, and 61: 1-3, etc., etc. "Shall drink 

of the brook in the way " — " faint, yet pursuing ;" refreshing him- 
self by quick draughts of water in his hot pursuit, and then on to 
victory ! Therefore shall he raise high the head in the triumph 
of complete success. His untiring zeal, his resistless spirit, in- 
sure his glorious triumph. 

PSALM CXI. 

This and the two succeeding Psalms are a group of praisc- 
Psalms, each commencing with " Hallelu-Jah " — praise ye Jab, 
i. e., Jehovah. This clause indicates the theme and purpose of 
each song, viz., to set forth the glorious works of the Lord as the 

ground and reason why he should be praised. This Psalm is 

an acrostic on the Hebrew Alphabet, each successive clause be- 
ginning with its successive letters ; in each of the first eight 
verses, two clauses ; in each of the last two, three. This would 

aid the memory. As to the date of these three praise-Psalms, 

we may safely locate them in the age of the restoration from the 
exile. 

1. Praise ye the Loed. I will praise the Lord with my 
whole heart, in the assembly of the upright, and in the con- 
gregation. 

2. The works of the Lord are great, sought out of all 
them that have pleasure therein. 

"I will praise the Lord," etc. The Psalmist not only calls on 
others — all his people — all men in every land and every age — to 



458 



PSALM CXI. 



praise the Lord, but avows his own earnest purpose to praise God 
with all his heart. Let every reader be a worshiper, and every 
worshiper throw his own soul into these words of the song and 

make this avowal his own ! In the last clause of v. 2 : " Sought 

out of all them that have pleasure therein," the Hebrew will bear 
either this sense or another, viz., sought out according to all their 
desirableness. The original may be either an adjective — by such 
as delight in them ; or a noun — for their delightfulness. In 
either construction the sentiment is true. 

3. His work is honorable and glorious: and his righteous- 
ness endureth forever. 

4. He hath made his wonderful works to be remembered : 
the Lord is gracious and full of compassion. 

Primarily the thought here is of those gracious works of provi- 
dence which had so adorned and distinguished the ancient history 
of the covenant people. It was inspiring to the returned exiles 
to recall those ancient works, to think of the mercy that shone 
forth in them, and of their being impressed on the national heart 
for everlasting remembrance. 

5. He hath given meat unto them that fear him ; he will 
ever be mindful of his covenant. 

" Meat " — food in general, yet in usage the word suggests food 
that costs effort, like that obtained by the hunter, or plucked, 
gathered with labor. The Israelites might naturally think of food 
supplied to their fathers in the Arabian desert — food of God's own 
preparation. His covenant held him to provide for his people in 
their emergencies — then as always. 

6. He hath showed his people the power of his works, 
that he may give them the heritage of the heathen. 

He hath made the great power of his arm manifest in his works, 
even to the extent of giving them Canaan and all its wealth as 
their inheritance. The inference suggested is that a God of such 
power can give his people the inheritance of all the nations for 
Christ, so that the labor of going forth into all the world to preach 
the gospel to every creature and bring all the nations to know and 
to serve the risen Jesus shall not prove abortive. 

7. The works of his hands are verity and judgment; all 
his commandments are sure. 

8. They stand fast for ever and ever, and are done in 
truth and uprightness. 

Two things, distinct yet related, are brought together in these verses, 
viz., what God himself does, and what he commands his people to do. 
The former are true and just ; the latter are " sure " in the sense of 
being worthy of being accepted as from God, and therefore obeyed. 
Then in v. 8, inverting the order of these two themes, the com- 



PSALM CXIL 



459 



mandments arc said to be established forever, and God's works are 
declared to be done in truth and uprightness. 

9. He sent redemption unto his people : he hath com- 
manded his covenant for ever : holy and reverend is his 
name. 

10. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom ; a 
good understanding have all they that do his commandments : 
his praise endureth for ever. 

"He sent redemption to his people," first from Egypt; last, 
from Babylon ; the former giving pledge of the latter, and both 
guaranteeing God's ever faithful love and his swift redeeming 

power in his people's behalf in every time of their need. " He 

hath commanded his covenant forever" — "command" in the sense 
of ordain, constitute. His covenant with- his people is no epheme- 
ral, transient thing. It was made for all time — as good lor the 

ages yet to come as for any of the ages past. The name of 

Him who thus remembers his people and abides forever faithful 
to his covenant should be held in holy reverence by all his 
saints, through all the ages. Such reverential fear, of which 
obedience, trust, and homage are the cardinal manifestations, con- 
stitute the highest wisdom — the first step and the last in a wise 
purpose and life. This thought is worth repeating; therefore the 
Psalmist adds : All who obey God evince a good understanding — 
a wholesome and discreet wisdom. Nothing less, nothing else, is 
truly wise. All other ways of moral living are folly and madness. 

-Kindred sentiments appear in Prov. I: 7, and 9: 10, and in 

Job 28 : 28. 

PSALM CXII. 

Like Psalm 111 this, too, is a praise-Psalm, and also a Hebrew 
acrostic on the same pattern. For these reasons this might be 
presumed to be one of a pair with that — a presumption fully con- 
firmed by the strain of the Psalm itself. Whereas that praised 
God for his mercy to his covenant people, this correspondingly 
praises him for his mercy to the individual saint. Whereas that 
closed with affirming the wisdom of obeying God in humble fear, 
this resumes the point there briefly touched and dropped, and pre- 
sents in detail the blessings of piety and prosperity which are sure 
to the truly wise and upright man. 

1. Praise ye the Lord. Blessed is the man that feareth 
the Lord, that delighteth greatly in his commandments. 

2. His seed shall be mighty upon earth : the generation 
of the upright shall be blessed. 

3. Wealth and riches shall be in his house : and his right- 
eousness endureth for ever. 



460 



PSALM CXII. 



The fact that " fearing the Lord " and " delighting greatly in 
his commandnients " are common elements in the same character 
suffices to shoAV that this fear is not servile but filial — is not that 
of the driven slave but that of the loving child. The real slave 

never has "great delight" in his master's commandments. Let 

the reader note that this Psalm aims to show that fearing the 
Lord is true wisdom, and to show it by the absolute success of a 
life so ordered. Wisdom being the best adjustment of means to 
secure the desired end, the truest test of wisdom is success. That 
life is a wisely ordered one which brings the best results of blessed- 
ness. Hence the scope of this Psalm. The first points made 

here are (a) That the wise man is blessed in his children 
and his children's children; (b) In the wealth of his house, 
made sure under the ancient economy by his abiding integrity and 

beneficence [" righteousness "]. Noticeably the very same words 

affirm the enduring righteousness of this just man that were used 
of God in v. 3 of the previous Psalm — suggesting that the good 
man becomes a follower of God as a dutiful child follows his 
father. 

4. Unto the upright there ariseth light in the darkness : 
he is gracious, and full. of compassion, and righteous. 

Even an upright man may perchance have some seasons of 
darkness ; but soon there ariseth a light upon his darkness like 
that of the rising sun upon a rayless night. By a most beautiful 

figure the Hebrew verb suggests the rising sun. The last clause 

of the verse may look toward the reason of this as existing in his 
kind and loving heart toward others in their sufferings. Here, 
again, the same words are used of the good man's heart which are 
so often used of his heavenly Father's, as e. g. in Ps. Ill : 4. 

5. A good man showeth favor, and lendeth : he will guide 
his affairs with discretion. 

The Hebrew can not be grammatically translated " a good man," 
but must be read, " Happy is the man." Under this construc- 
tion the Psalmist starts anew after the manner of v. 1 : " Blessed 
is the man," etc. "Lendeth" — not on usury, but in compas- 
sion. "He will guide" [better, sustain] his affairs with good 

judgment, and so insure prosperous results. 

6. Surely he shall not be moved for ever : the righteous 
shall be in everlasting remembrance. 

" Shall not be moved " — shall not be changed in character and 
consequently in condition. He shall undergo no such change long- 
as he may live. The next clause looks onward beyond his 

death. His memory shall live after him. Some critics give the 
clause this turn : In eternal remembrance he shall be known as 
righteous, i. e., rather his righteousness than himself shall be re- 
membered ; as if to say, in the strongest form, that he is remem- 
bered only for his righteousness. 



PSALM CXIII. 



461 



7. Pie shall not be afraid of evil tidings : his heart is 
fixed, trusting in the Lord. 

Shall not be afraid of evil tidings when they actually come, the 
words here used mean, rather than being afraid lest they may 
come. Doubtless both are true of the good man whose heart 
abides fixed in trust upon his God. Literally the passage would 
read — " He shall not fear because of evil tidings." Believing that 
God's providence shapes all events, and confiding in his love with- 
out a fear, why may he not be calm and fearless under any new 
event brought to his knowledge as "evil tidings ?" 

8. His heart is established, he shall not be afraid, until 
he see his desire upon his enemies. 

9. He hath dispersed, he hath given to the poor; his 
righteousness endureth forever; his horn shall be exalted 
with honor. 

" Shall not be afraid until he seeth his desire upon his ene- 
mies" — nor after that, either. The strain of the passage and its 

whole argument forbid any such implication. Devoting himself 

to beneficence toward the poor, he insures God's protection in his 
emergencies. God will lift high his horn of power. See Ps. 75 : 
4, and 89 : 17. 

10. The wicked shall see it, and be grieved ; he shall 
gnash with his teeth, and melt away: the desire of the 
wicked shall perish. 

All unlike this is the case of the wicked. He shall see the 
prosperity of the righteous, and be vexed and galled in spirit 
thereby. Ah, how soon shall his hopes and himself perish utterly 
and forever! 

PSALM CXIII. 

This third in order of the praise-Psalms fitly closes the triplet 
by making the call to praise universal, through all time and over 
all the earth (vs. 1-3) ; by setting forth most sublime views of 
God's greatness and excellent glory (vs. 4-6); coupled with cer- 
tain specific illustrations of his special blessings on classes most 
needy (vs. 7-9). 

1. Praise ye the Lord. Praise, O ye servants of the 
Lord, praise the name of the Lord. 

The phrase, " Servants of the Lord " to designate his professed 
people, appears quite prominently in the age of the restoration. 
It may be seen Ps. 136 : 22, but especially in Ezra 5 : 11, and Neh. 
1 : 10 ; " We are the servants of the God of heaven " — designedly 
distinguishing themselves from all other people by the name of 



462 



PSALM CXIII. 



the God they served : " Now these are thy servants and thy peo- 
ple "—bringing up these relations before God as the ground of 

confidence in prayer for his own Zion. All such servants are 

here exhorted to join in offering to their own great God the ex- 
alted praise which is his due. 

2. Blessed be the name of the Lord from this time 
forth and for evermore. 

3. From the rising of the sun unto the going down of 
the same the Lord's name is to be praised. 

Such a God should be praised through all the ages onward, for 
he has already wrought praiseworthy deeds enough to call for 

everlasting praise. Over all the earth too, for nowhere does he 

ever leave himself without witness to his glorious goodness and 
mercy. 

4. The Lord is high above all nations, and his glory 
above the heavens. 

5. Who is like unto the Lord our God, who dwelleth 
on high, 

6. Who humbleth himself to behold the things that are in 
heaven, and in the earth ! 

Comparing God with his created works, he is high above all 
his intelligent creatures, though massed even by nations ; and the 
glory of his infinite being eclipses the very heavens. Who can 
be compared with Him, dwelling so high, and yet humbling him- 
self so low in condescending care of his lowly creatures ! 

7. He raiseth up the poor out of the dust, and lifteth 
the needy out of the dunghill ; 

8. That he may set him with princes, even with the prin- 
ces of his people. 

9. He maketh the barren woman to keep house, and to be 
a joyful mother of children. Praise ye the Lord. 

The case of lifting up the lowly to an estate so high suggests 
David, as the blessing upon the barren woman seems to indicate 
Hannah or possibly Abraham's Sarah. The Hebrew of the last 
verse should rather be read ; " He maketh the barren one of the 
house the joyful mother of children." A few specific cases well 
known in Hebrew history would serve to give definite impressions 
of God's condescension to the humblest of his people. Think- 
ing of these three praise-Psalms as written in the age of the resto- 
ration, we may fitly remember that the restoration itself was a 
grand theme for national praise. The great sin of their national 
apostasy from God at length forgiven ; the bands of their national 
captivity broken and that by agencies in which the hand of God 
was far more visible than the hand of man; the exiles safely 



PSALM CXIV. 



463 



home in the father-land; the temple going up or finished, to their 
unspeakable joy : surely this should have been the era for na- 
tional Psalms of praise. It is pleasant to see that there were 
faithful prophets of God and honest governors of Judah who ap- 
preciated their duty in this matter, and who led forth the masses 
of the people in lofty praise by means of the songs of the great 
congregation. 

PSALM CXIV. 

This gem of Hebrew poetry, coming down to us with no name 
of author, and with no special clew to its date except its place in 
the compilation, doubtless belongs to the age of the restoration. 
It serves to show how beautifully they could weave into their 
songs for the sanctuary the grand facts of their nation's early his- 
tory. The prayer of Nehemiah (chap. 9) witnesses to the use 
made of those same grand facts in their historical point of view, 
to inspire faith, to encourage prayer, and to suggest the great 
moral lessons taught there concerning their nation's God and his 
people. 

1. When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob 
from a people of strange language ; 

2. Judah was his sanctuary, and Israel his dominion. 

" When Israel went out of Egypt " — yet not restricting his view 
to that precise point of time. Then and subsequently — embracing 
the series of events that followed. " A people of strange lan- 
guage " — of a foreign tongue, unknown to the sons of Jacob. So 
the history of Joseph shows. It indicated the hardships of their 
lot that the people to whom they were in political bondage were so 
foreign in their nationality and tongue. " Judah was his sanc- 
tuary ; " i. e., the place of it, and the people who were consecrated 
to him as his. " Israel was his kingdom." Such were not only the 
tenor but the very words of the covenant; "Ye shall be unto me 
a kingdom of priests and an holy nation " (Ex. 19 : 6). 

3. The sea saw it, and fled ; Jordan was driven back. 

4. The mountains skipped liked rams, and the little hills 
like lambs. 

The Red Sea saw not it " but God." Well might it " flee ! " 
"Jordan was turned back" [Hebrew]; forced up stream, and its 
waters piled into heaps (Josh. 3:13, 16). — — " The mountains 
skipped," etc. — by poetic license to represent the historic fact that 
Mt. Sinai " quaked greatly " (Ex. 19 : 18). 

5. What ailed thee, O thou sea, that thou fleddest ? thou 
Jordan, that thou wast driven back ? 



461 



PSALM CXV. 



6. Ye mountains, that ve skipped like rams ; and ve little ' 
hills, like lambs ? 

7. Tremble, thou earth, at the presence of the Lord, at the 
presence of the God of Jacob ; 

8. Which turned the rock into a standing water, the flint 
into a fountain of waters. 

As if the Red Sea. the Jordan and Mi Sinai, had a conscious, 
intelligent life, and were able to give an account of themselves for 
their strange movements ! This is bold but most beautiful per- 
sonification. The poet asks them this most reasonable question, 
yet he neither expects nor waits for their answer, but virtually 
gives it himself. It was but fit that all nature should stand in 
awe before her glorious Creator. Tremble, thou earth, at the 
presence of the Lord Jehovah, who is the very God of Jacob — for 
think yet further what wonders his hand hath wrought who 
"turned the rock into a pool of water,"' etc. The reader will 
readily refer this to the two miracles which brought water from 
the rock; first at Eephidim (Ex. 17 : 1-7) ; next at Kadesh (Xum. 
20: 1-11). Compare Ps. 107 : 35 and Deut. 8 : 15. What can not 
such a God do for his needy people in any possible emergency ? 
4i Is any thing too hard for the Lord " — the mighty Lord of nature ? 

M^OO • 

PSALM CXV. 

This Psalm corresponds so admirably in subject-matter and tone 
to the circumstances of the restoration, that it leaves no doubt as 
to its date and occasion. The people have had some blessings, but 
they ask much more. God has broken the bands of their national 
bondage ; but still they are few in number ; weak in political 
strength ; are not even above reproach and insult from adjacent 
idolators. But their God is mighty — infinitely far above the gods 
of the heathen, and quite able to set them on high above such 
reproaches. To such trust the Psalm exhorts all classes of the 
restored people. 

1, Xot unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto thy name 
give glory, for thy mercy, and for thy truth's sake. 

This is not an exhortation to men to ascribe glory to God, but a 
prayer to God that he would glorify himself for his own name's 
sake. The address is to the Lord, and the imperative, '"give 
glory," is prayer that he would secure it for himself. This by no 
means conflicts with the delightful duty devolving on God's people 
to give him all glory ; it rather assumes this, and goes still farther, 
even to the prayer "that God would do the great things we ask of 
him, not to glorify us, but himself. 



PSALM CXV. 



465 



2. Wherefore should the heathen say, Where is now their 
God? 

3. But our God is in the heavens : he hath done whatso- 
ever he hath pleased. 

These supposed or real words of the heathen are simply reproach- 
ful. " If they have any God, where is He ? They are badly in 
need of his help : Why does he not come to their relief? " Where- 
upon the Psalmist says, Why should they have the least occasion 
to say this ? Why, O Lord, wilt thou not shut their mouths forever 
from uttering such reproachful words against thy people and yet 

more against Thyself? Compare Ps. 79 : 10. " Where is now" — 

but the Hebrew does not ask — Where is their God now, in this 
emergency ; but Where, pray, — do tell us where is their God ? 
The Hebrew word * is used to make u where" more emphatic, and 
to give the question a touch of sarcasm and insult. The Psalm- 
ist answers; " Our God is in the heavens, where he should be ; on 
his lofty throne, mighty for any work he may please to do. As 

he has heretofore done all his pleasure, so he can still. As to 

the suggestive force of the thought — God is in heaven, see Ps. 2 : 4, 
and li: 4, and 103: 19. 

4. Their idols are silver and gold, the work of men's 
hands. 

5. They have mouths, but they speak not: eyes have 
they, but they see not : 

6. They have ears, but they hear not : noses have they, 
but they smell not : 

7. They have hands, but they handle not : feet have they, 
but they walk not : neither speak they through their throat. 

8. They that make them are like unto them ; so is every 
one that trusteth in them. 

Turning the tables and retorting their reproaches, the Psalmist 
says; "Their gods are nothing but a variety of manufactures ; man- 
made things ; at best, but silver and gold ; often of wood only. 

See the same way of exposing the folly of idol worship ; Isa. 40 : 

18-20, and 44: 9-20, and 46 : 5-7, and Jer. 10: 3-15. They are 

made with mouths; but these are only mere imitations, with no 
power to speak. As the Hebrew has it, they will not speak [future 
tense] ; they never will, never can, say the first word. So in all 
these specifications, the future means not only that they can not 

now, but that they never will or can. They have hands, but 

they handle nothing; never use them; never even touch with those 

useless hands. " Neither speak they through their throat " — 

means they never make even the inarticulate, guttural noises 
common to the lower animals, which fall far short of the articulate 



466 



PSALM CXV. 



voice. No less void of sense than these senseless idols are all 

their makers and their worshipers. This very worship proves their 
miserable folly. 

9. O Israel, trust thou in the Lord ; he is their help and 
their shield. 

10. O house of Aaron, trust in the Lord ; he is their 
help and their shield. 

11. Ye that fear the Lord, trust in the Lord : he is 
their help and their shield. 

In each of these three verses, the first clause exhorts in direct ad- 
dress, in the second person ; the last clause assigns the reason, in 
the third person. The distinction of person might be represented 
not badly by uttering the exhortation with full, loud tone, and the 
reason in an undertone. " The house of Aaron " became spec- 
ially prominent both in numbers and in activity after the restora- 
tion compared with what they were before. This prominence 
appears in the prophets Haggai and Zechariah. (Hag. 1 : 1, 12, 
14, and 2: 11-13, Zech. 7: 3, 5, etc). 

12. The Lord hath been mindful of us ; he will bless us ; 
he will bless the house of Israel ; he will bless the house of 
Aaron. 

13. He will bless them that fear the Lord, both small 
and great. 

Far from assuming that we have had no blessings from our God 
yet, we gratefully acknowledge his favor in our past history, and 

derive from it the assurance of fresh mercies for the future. 

In v. 12, the second and third clauses should be brought more 
closely together to give its due force to the repetition : u He will 
bless ; surely he will bless the house of Israel. The small with 
the great;" absolutely all the people. 

14. The Lord shall increase you more and more, you 
and your children. 

15. Ye are blessed of the Lord which made heaven and 
earth. 

Increase of population was a matter of great moment to the in- 
fant colony of Judea. That their Jehovah made heaven and earth 
would suggest his infinite resources for blessing his people. "Who 
could ask a more powerful Friend, a richer God than he ? 

16. The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord's : but 
the earth hath he given to the children of men. 

The first clause seems to suggest not so much that the Lord 
owns or claims as his own the heavens as that He makes them 
his abode, while he gives the earth to man as his. " The heavens 
are heavens for the Lord to dwell in," etc. The inference thought 



PSALM CXVI. 



467 



of is that the Lord will befriend us with a great increase of popu- 
lation. When he had finished this fair earth and placed man upon 
it, he said, "Be fruitful and multiply; replenish the earth " given 
you for your abode. 

17. The dead praise not the Lord, neither any that go 
down into silence. 

18. But we will bless the Lord from this time forth and 
for evermore. Praise the Lord. 

The dead can not join in our public praises in the great congre- 
gation. This seems to be the controlling thought, giving shape to 
the expression in this passage. It should not be taken as affirm- 
ing any thing respecting their conscious existence or agency in 
their future life. The antithesis is made strongly between their 
place in our earthly songs and our own. We who yet live can 
lift up our grateful songs in God's temple ; but their voices in these 
songs are unheard; as to them, here and now, all is silent!— — 
The same construction obtains in other similar passages ; e. g. % 

Ps. 6: 5, and 30: 9, and 88: 10-12, and Isa. 38: 18. But we, 

the living, will give thee our grateful praises. 

PSALM CXVI. 

The occurrence in this Psalm of certain grammatical forms 
which indicate the later age of the Hebrew tongue has carried the 
judgment of critics in favor of dating it after the captivity. To 
this its place in the Psalter corresponds. Vs. 18, 19 imply that 
the temple had then been rebuilt. In subject this is a thanks- 
giving song for restoration from sickness, yet may be used sug- 
gestively in thanksgiving for any great blessing after calamity. 

1. I love the Lord, because he hath heard my voice and 
my supplications. 

2. Because he hath inclined his ear unto me, therefore 
will I call upon him as long as I live. 

Strictly the tenses are — " I have loved the Lord, for he will hear, 
etc.; but in this passage (as often) both the past and the future 
tenses have an eye to the present, thus : I have loved the Lord and 
do still love him, because he not only hears my supplications now, 

but will hear in all my future life. Because he has bent his 

ear low to my feeble voice, therefore will I call upon him in both 
prayer and praise throughout my days of life. The calling ufon 

God, thought of here, manifestly included praise. (See v. 13). 

This is the grateful utterance of the convalescent who has felt the 
pains and prostrations of disease, but now looks out once more 
upon the joys of active life and usefulness. 



468 



PSALM CXVI. 



3. The sorrows of death compassed me, and the pains of 
hell gat hold upon me : I found trouble and sorrow. 

4. Then called I upon the name of the Lord ; O Lord, 
I beseech thee, deliver my soul. 

The first clauses are from Ps. 18: 4, 5. The pains of hell 

["sheol," the grave and death] literally "found" me, but the word 

implies a vigorous grasp upon him. " I found " (and said to 

myself, I shall find) only trouble, etc., the verb being future. I 

have this at present ; and nothing better in prospect. " Deliver 

my soul," but with no emphasis on " soul" as the spiritual part — 
the sense being primarily — Spare my life; save me from the jaws 
of death. 

5. Gracious is the Lord, and righteous ; yea, our God is 
merciful. 

6. The Lord preserveth the simple : I was brought low, 
and he helped me. 

The first impression on the mind and the first utterance is of 
God's grace and mercy — to be spoken of even before he tells us 

of his restoration. The " simple " — the sincere ; those of single 

eye and of one heart to fear and trust God. "He helped me" — 

is literally, he saved me; brought salvation to me. 

7. Keturn unto thy rest, O my soul ; for the Lord hath 
dealt bountifully with thee. 

8. For thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes 
from tears, and my feet from falling. 

9. I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living. 
As Noah's wandering dove came home to the ark for a place of 

rest [the same word as here], so the pious soul returns to God. 
Under genial skies, one might leave the ark and find temporary 
rest for the sole of his foot out on the wide world; but when the 
floods beat and the wild waters surge, there is but one relief — 
"Keturn unto thy rest, 0 my soul!" O, is there any other such 

blessedness as this sweet rest in God ! The purpose of grateful, 

loving service should be noted and never forgotten ; " I will walk," 
i. e., in the converse of a close communion and in the activities of 
a willing service. The same word expresses Enoch's " walking 
with God." 

10. I believed, therefore have I spoken : I was greatly 
afflicted : 

11. I said in my haste, All men are liars. 

This passage is somewhat difficult. The choice seems to me to 

lie between the two following constructions. (1) "I have 

believed, for I have spoken, i. e., of God's truth and faithfulness as 
I should not have done if I had not believed ; I was greatly afflicted, 
and said in my haste, "All men are false" — but God is true and 



PSALM CXVI. 



4G9 



he alone is to be trusted — more emphasis being laid on the latter 

thought, implied, than on the one expressed. (2) " I have 

believed although I have spoken ; I was greatly afflicted and under 
the sting of my pain I said. in hot haste, "All men are false " — 
this being the thing "spoken" to which he refers in the words — 

"I have spoken." In favor of the former construction is the 

Septuagint, quoted by Paul (2 Cor. 4 : 13). For the latter is the 
somewhat common usage of the verb translated " spoken" * to state 
the abstract fact of speaking, followed by the verb " said " f to in- 
troduce the very words spoken. If " I have spoken," in v. 10, does 
not refer to these words in v. 11, there is nothing to indicate their 
reference. Besides, the only natural construction of v. 11 gives 
prominence to the words there spoken as hasty and exceptionable ; 
as opposed to assuming that the main idea lies in the unexpressed 
antithesis, viz., God only is true. I therefore incline to the latter 

construction. The word translated "for "X may mean although, 

as in Ps. 49: 18 and Ex. 13 : 17. 

12. What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits 
toward me ? 

13. I will take the cup of salvation, and call upon the 
name of the Lord. 

14. I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the 
presence of all his people. 

One mercy to be thankful for is the kind forgiveness which blots 
out and passes over our hot and hasty words. But all God's bene- 
fits, who can recount ? How they rise up and spread themselves 

out before the mind of the convalescing man ! What shall he do ? 

In harmony with the beautiful custom of the pious Hebrew, let him 
go before the great congregation; "take the cup of salvation" — 
the cup bearing his thank-offering for salvations received — and 
" call upon the name of the Lord " in grateful acknowledgment 
and thankful praises, paying the vows which his burdened soul 

made in the long and bitter hours of his pain and peril. Exe- 

getically, the main question of the passage turns on the word " cup." 
It has been commonly applied to an assumed usage of offering a 
little wine (of course in a "cup") in connection with the Mosaic 
" peace " or thank-offering. This would be fitly " the cup of salva- 
tion" in the sense of the cup of thanksgiving for the salvations 
experienced — in this case from sickness. But Dr. Alexander says, 
" W e read of no such cup in Scripture, and its origin may probably 
be traced to the rabbinical interpretation of this very passage. 
Interpreted by Scripture analogies, it simply means— I will accept 
the portion God allots me. See Ps. 11: 6 and 16: 5." The evi- 
dence for the use of wine in the peace or thank-offering appears in 
Num. 15 : 8-10 : " Thou shalt bring for a drink offering half an hin 
of wine," etc. This relates to "a sacrifice in performing a vow or 



♦at ibRf -on* 



470 



PSALM CXVL 



peace-offering unto the Lord." It really seems of small consequence 
whether the law specified the word " cup," for a cup to hold wine 

is a simple necessity. The construction which Dr. Alexander 

presents is harsh — i. e., "cup" in the sense of the lot or portion 
which God gives ; for this may be affliction, pain, rather than sal- 
vation. Such a sense is too indefinite for this passage and too alien 
from its scope and spirit. I must adhere to the usual and in my 
view well established construction of these most beautiful words. 

In v. 14, "jnow" has no reference to time; but is a particle 

of entreaty. 0 let me, I beseech thee, pay my vows in the presence 
of all the people — it is such a privilege ! 

15. Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his 
saints. 

"Precious in the sight of the Lord" — not a matter of small 
concern, but one of deepest interest, calling out his tenderest pity 
and sympathy. Ah* indeed, for has not our Jesus felt the pangs 
of death ? Is it not of his own benevolent nature that he should 
feel every pain of his suffering people, as if it were his own ? 
Verily, "Ave have not an High Priest who can not be touched with 
the feeling of our infirmities," but one who can be, and, indeed, who 
can not fail to be. So that the chief redeeming feature in the 
sufferings of Christ's people lies in the manifestations of divine 
sympathy which Jesus is sure to make to those who abide in him. 
How often are these sympathies revealed in their fullness and glory 
to his children as they come near the Jordan of death, and as their 
feet dip into its waters ! To them is given the witness that these 
words of our Psalm are most true. 

16. O Lord, truly I am thy servant ; I am thy servant, 
and the son of thine handmaid : thou hast loosed my 
bonds. 

The English version here misses the finer touches of feeling, the 
first word of the verse being a particle of entreaty, and the word 
for "truly" having the sense of for, thus: "Ah Lord, I pray 
thee— for I am thy servant," etc. The thing sought is implied, 

not expressed : doubtless God's sparing, restoring mercy. The 

strength of these protestations of willing service and hearty de- 
votion to God is to be noticed, the appropriate requital for such 
and so great mercy. " Thou hast loosed my bonds," the bonds 
of pain and weakness which held me fast and so near the grave ! 

17. I will offer to thee the sacrifice of thanksgiving, and 
will call upon the name of the Lord. 

18. I will pay my vows unto the Lord now in the pres- 
ence of all his people. 

19. In the courts of the Lord's house, in the midst of 
thee, O Jerusalem. Praise ye the Lord. 



PSALM CXVII— CXIII. 



471 



These verses repeat and intensify the leading sentiments of the 
Psalm. Such sentiments will bear frequent repetition, and the 
most solemn reiteration. 

PSALM CXVII. 

1. O praise the Lord, all ye nations : praise him, all ye 
his people. 

2. For his merciful kindness is great toward us : and the 
truth of the Lord endureth forever. Praise ye the Lord. 

This short Psalm looks forth from the one suffering individual, 
himself a pious Israelite, to the nations of the wide earth. Let 
all the nations — even all the individual men that make up the na- 
tions — praise the Lord ; for his merciful loving-kindness is great, 
even toward them. His great salvation reaches them in its legit- 
imate scope and purpose ; the limitless love of the Infinite Father 
embraces them all, and makes them welcome to the blessings he 

offers to his obedient worshipers. It should be noticed that 

Paul (Rom. 15 : 11) read in this Psalm a prophecy of salvation to 
the Gentile world, and found here in part his authority for giving 
them the glorious gospel of a crucified and risen Savior. This 
fact might well be one of the themes of praise for ancient Israel, 
as also for ali the people of God in every age. This broad out- 
look of these verses adapts them to the purpose of a doxology, to 
be appended to a much longer song. Perhaps they stand thus by 
themselves because they were used as a doxology, not for Ps. 116 
only, but for various other Psalms. 

PSALM CXVIII. 

In its adaptation to the circumstances of the restored exiles, 
this Psalm has strong points of resemblance to Ps. 116. We 
must date it in the times and scenes historically sketched by Ezra 
(chap. 6: 16-22); i. e., the dedication of the new temple. True, 
the allusion (v. 22) to the " chief corner-stone " seems to favor the 
special reference of the Psalm to the scene of laying the founda- 
tion-stone as given historically Ezra 3 : 10-13 ; but over against 
this, "the opening of the gates" (vs. 19, 20), and the phrase, 
"We have blessed you out of the house of the Lord," (v. 26), 

seem to demand a reference to the real dedication of the house. 

That the writer speaks throughout in the singular number as of 
himself does not exclude the participation of all the people in his 
song. Rather it was expected that every one would join in the 
song, making its utterances personal to himself. So the song 
would become the voice of the whole people. 



472 



PSALM CXVI1I. 



1. O give thanks unto the Lord ; for he is good : be- 
cause his mercy endureth forever. 

2. Let Israel now say, that his mercy endureth forever. 

3. Let the house of Aaron now say, that his mercy endu r- 
eth forever. 

4. Let them now that fear the Lord say, that his mercy 
endureth forever. 

The first vs. gives the key-note of the song. In vs. 2, 3, 4, 

the word " now " has no relation to time, but is the same particle 
of entreaty already noticed (Ps. 116: 14, 18). Its force may be 
well indicated thus: "0 that Israel would say — "His mercy en- 
dureth forever," etc. 

5. I called upon the Lord in distress : the Lord an- 
swered me, and set me in a large place. 

What grammarians call the " constructio pregnans " gives 
beauty and force to the original, somewhat thus: "I cried unto 
the Lord out of my straitness : he answered me into largeness " — 
i. e., his answer brought me forth into a large, ample place. 

6. The Lord is on my side ; I will not fear : what can 
man do unto me ? 

7. The Lord taketh my part with them that help me: 
therefore shall I see my desire upon them that hate me. 

Literally, " the Lord is for me or to me as mine own God. 

What can man, frail man of the earth* do unto me," protected 

by such a Defender? "The Lord is for me with my helpers," 

and "I shall look upon my haters," i. c, look down upon them 
fearlessly. 

8. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confi- 
dence in man. 

9. It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confi- 
dence in princes. 

Cyrus, king of Persia, had done a noble deed for the exiles of 
Judah, and this deed was still fresh and precious in their memory; 
yet even so, it was better to trust in the Lord than in him — aye 
far better, for really all this help from him was ultimately from 
the Lord, who " had stirred up his spirit to do this manly deed." 

10. All nations compassed me about: but in the name 
of the Lord will I destroy them. 

11. They compassed me about; yea, they compassed me 
about: but in the name of the Lord I will destroy them. 



PSALM CXVIII. 



473 



12. They compassed me about like bees ; they are 
quenched as the fire of thorns : for in the name of the Lord 
I will destroy them. 

The last clause in each of these three verses has precisely the 
same Hebrew words. Literally translated, they would read ; " In 
the name of the Lord, for I will destroy them." The word repre- 
senting/or* will bear the sense of "that" as a conjunction. 
The clause is really difficult. Critics mostly translate " that," and 
then supply variously, "I declare;" "I swear" [the solemn 
oath] ; " it is;" " it is certain; " or "I trust." I incline to the 
last named — "I trust in the name of the Lord that I shall destroy 
them." 

13. Thou hast thrust sore at me that I might fall : but 
the Lord helped me. 

By a sudden transition the Psalmist accosts his enemy as pres- 
ent : u Thou hast thrust at me violently, even to make me fall ; but 
the Lord helped me." 

14. The Lord is my strength and song, and is become 
my salvation. 

15. The voice of rejoicing and salvation is in the taber- 
nacles of the righteous : the right hand of the Lord doeth 
valiantly. 

16. The right hand of the Lord is exalted: the right 
hand of the Lord doeth valiantly. 

" Voice of rejoicing " — a word which means, loud shouts of joy. 
"And salvation," i e., the voice of salvation — which is a voice of 
joy because of salvation experienced. This is heard not only in 
the public assemblies, but at home, in the tents of the righteous. 
The next phrase, viz., "the right hand of the Lord," etc., may be 
taken as the very words of this joyful song in praise of the Al- 
mighty. The great event in special view was God's hand up- 
lifted to take them out of their bondage in Babylon and bring 
them safely home to their father-land. There was abundant rea- 
son for magnifying this glorious "right hand." 

17. I shall not die, but live, and declare the works of the 
Lord. 

18. The Lord hath chastened me sore : but he hath not 
given me over unto death. 

"I shall not die," before the enemies of our people, hating and 
threatening on every side round about ; but shall live to testify in 
praise of God's marvelous works of redemption for his people. 
My chastening during seventy years of weary bondage has been 



474 



PSALM CXVIII. 



sore ; but God has spared us from national extinction — me (each 
one of us may say) from personal death. 

19. Open to me the gates of righteousness : I will go into 
them, and I will praise the Lord : 

20. This gate of the Lord, into which the righteous shall 
enter. 

Why called "gates of righteousness?" Probably because they 
were the gates fOr the righteous people to enter, as said in v. 20 : 
the gates of their temple, this being probably the dedication song. 

See Ezra 6 : 16-22. "I will go into them," so let all the people 

say in their united song. 

21. I will praise thee : for thou hast heard me, and art 
become my salvation. 

Thou hast heard my uplifted cry for help, even in that land of 
our bondage. The reader will recall the prayer of Daniel (chap. 
9); also the prophetic foreshowings as to their supplications as 
given (Jer. 29 : 10-14), and a specimen of their sorrowful utter- 
ances and of God's reply as in Jer. 31 : 18-20. 

22. The stone which the builders refused is become the 
head-stone of the corner. 

23. This is the Lord's doing; it is marvelous in our 
eyes. 

V. 22 is doubtless a proverb in current use, in its primary ap- 
plication expressing the case of the Jews as a nation, apparently 
thrust out by their exile from any place among the nations ; but 
now restored again, and through the great Messiah, soon to be- 
come the head-stone of the corner of God's great spiritual temple — 
Messiah's kingdom being destined to outshine all other kingdoms 
and long outlast them all. The glory of the Israel of Ezra's day 
was in itself of small account; but, thought of as having in it the 
germ of their Messiah's glorious kingdom, the -prophetic eye saw 
it " the head-stone of the corner." It was therefore by no lati- 
tude of accommodation and by no forcing of words into other or 
greater sense than their own, that Jesus found in this passage a 
definite prophetic allusion to himself and his gospel kingdom — an 
allusion so forcible and conclusive that each of the first three 
evangelists bring out the case in full (Mat. 21 : 33-46, and Mk. 

12: 1-12, and Luke 20: 9-19). "This," says the Psalmist, 

"has come to pass of the Lord" — by virtue of his special agen- 
cies : He and He alone has done it. We look upon it with admir- 
ing wonder ! 

24. This is the day which the Lord hath made ; we will 
rejoice and be glad in it. 

"Day," not in the specific sense of a twenty-four hour period, 
but in the not infrequent sense, a period or event of peculiar 



PSALM CXVIII. 



475 



character, as when we speak of "the day of small things" (Zech. 
4: 10) or "a day of wonders." There may possibly be a refer- 
ence to the dedication day of the new temple, but if so, the 
thought broadens out to embrace all the great events which cul- 
minated in that dedication. Well do they say, "Let us rejoice 

and be glad therein." 

25. Save now, I beseech thee, O Loed : O Loed, I be- 
seech thee, send now prosperity. 

26. Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Loed : 
we have blessed you out of the house of the Loed. 

Here also the word "now" expresses not time but entreaty; 
best translated, " Save, I pray." These two Hebrew words are 
transferred [not translated] into our version in "Jlosanna" as in 
Mat. 21 : 9, where the multitudes who preceded and followed our 
Lord in his triumphal entry into Jerusalem seized upon the very 
words of this passage. Xo words could have been more appro- 
priate. Of him pre-eminently was it said in this prophecy, 
"Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord." £ee Mar. 
23 : 39. " He that should come," the great " coming One," be- 
came his special designation, as we see in Mat. 11 : 3, and Jn. 

6 : 14, and 4: 25. Compare also Malachi 3 : 1. If it be asked, 

How can we suppose an allusion to the Messiah in these words 
sung at the dedication of the second temple ? The answer is that 
the glory of the restoration of Israel fiom exile lay in its pledge 
of the coming Messiah — lay in the fact that the nation had in 
it the germ of future salvation for the world in the person of the 
coming Redeemer. But for this, the nation might well enough 
have sunk into oblivion and been lost in the undistinguished flow 
of human generations. Hence the light of prophecy gleamed 
forth afresh under Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi, and also here 

in this Psalm belonging to the same period. If these words — 

"Blessed be he that cometh in the name of the Lord" have any 
primary reference — suppose to some prophet of that age, still it is 
so weak, so obscure, and so entirely eclipsed by its more manifest 
and commanding allusion to the great Messiah that there seems 
little occasion to inquire after it. 

27. God is the Loed, which hath showed us light : bind 
the sacrifice with cords, even unto the horns of the altar. 

The mighty God ["El"] is our "Jehovah," in the sense of our 
faithful, covenant God; he hath shed upon us this glorious pro- 
phetic light as to "Him that cometh in the name of the Lord." 
Xow, therefore, bind the sacrificial animal with cords and lead him 
safely up to the horns of the altar. The sense is not — Tie him 
to the horns of the altar, but lead him bound up to the very altar, 
there to be offered in sacrifice. There is no emphasis on horns 
as distinct from the altar itself. It is only a poetic definiteness, 
for the sake of stronger impression. 



476 



PSALM CXIX. 



28. Thou art my God, and I will praise thee : thou art 
my God, I will exalt thee. 

29. O give thanks unto the Lord ; for he is good : for his 
mercy endureth forever. 

The original for God gives force to this passage; Thou art my 
il JSl" — the Mighty One; therefore will I praise Thee: my 
"Eloah" — a varied form with substantially the same sense, "and 

I will extol Thee " — lift Thee high in glory and honor. The 

usual doxology closes this precious Psalm: — "O give thanks to 
Jehovah, for he is good : for his mercy is forever ! " 

PSALM CXIX. 

This Psalm, unique in form, in length, and in subject-matter, 
treats almost exclusively of the written word of God, celebrating, 
we might say, its praises, unfolding its value and its virtues, and 
especially its precious relations to the religious experiences of the 
heart and the life. Comparing it with other Psalms, it finds 
resemblances in Ps. 1, and might be supposed to have taken Ps. 

19 : 7-14 for its text. It should be noted, however, that it does 

not restrict itself to the preceptive laws of God, nor even to the 
larger sense of statutes and ordinances; but includes also the 
historical ways of God in his administration over men: — "Thou 
puttest away all the wicked of the earth like dross : therefore I 

love thy testimonies." All the words of Hebrew use, expressing 

God's will as to man's duty — " law," " statutes," " commandments," 
"testimonies," "judgments," etc., we shall find with constant 
repetition and variety, constituting the one grand theme of this 

wonderful Psalm. As to date and author; its place in Book V 

strongly favors its date after the restoration. The brief historical 
sketches given of Ezra put their finger upon him as [probably] the 
author. The prominent points in his history are that he was a 
"priest," and especially "a scribe in the law" of Moses; " a ready 
scribe; i. e., trained, skilled, expert; a man who had made this 
his business and profession; "a scribe of the words of the com- 
mandments of the Lord and of his statutes to Israel" Moreover, 
he was eminently a man of wisdom, of fidelity, of prayer, and of 
profound sympathy with the spirit of the divine law and with the 
true interests of God's kingdom. A careful study of his history, 
as in Ezra 7-10, and Neh. 8, will disclose many of the leading 

points of character which are unfolded in this Psalm. The 

Psalm is constructed in twenty-two sections, indicated by the suc- 
cessive twenty-two letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Each of the eight 
verses in each several section begins with the Hebrew letter which 
gives name to the section. This fullest development of the acrostic 
principle had for its main purpose to aid the memory — a matter of 



PSALM CXIX. 



477 



great importance when printing was unknown and books were 

costly and rare. This Psalm is plain, presenting but few points 

that require explanation. 

1. Blessed are the undefiled in the way, who walk in the 
law of the Lord. 

2. Blessed are they that keep his testimonies, and that seek 
him with the whole heart. 

" 0 how blessed ; " or, " O the blessedness of the men of un- 
blemished life — made thus pure and perfect by obeying the law 
of the Lord. The blessing comes only to those who study and 
obey this law with all the heart. 

3. They also do no iniquity : they walk in his ways. 

Both verbs are in the past tense. Their record testifies to a pure 
life ; " they have done no iniquity ; they have walked in his ways. 
It is not enough that they should make professions, or should talk 
well of their experiences. They must have the record of actual 
right living. 

4. Thou hast commanded us to keep thy precepts dili- 
gently. 

5. O that my ways were directed to keep thy statutes ! 

" O that my ways were directed" — but the Hebrew word means 
more than merely instructed, shown in the right way. It signifies 
established, confirmed — a very suitable thing to pray for. He longs 
to attain fixed, settled habits, in which his ways should, as the 
word suggests, become solid in the right. 

6. Then shall I not be ashamed, when I have respect 
unto all thy commandments. 

7. I will praise thee with uprightness of heart, when I 
shall have learned thy righteous judgments. 

8. I will keep thy statutes : O forsake me not utterly. 

In v. 6 the emphatic word is <£ all." The glory of a religious 
life — that which lifts it to honor and above conscious shame, is the 
having respect to all— not to a selected part only, but to all God's 
commandments. 

9. Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way ? by 
taking heed thereto according to thy word. 

Instead of question and answer both in this one verse, the 
Hebrew demands the construction with question only, ' leaving 
the answer to be inferred from the drift of the entire Psalm — 
thus: "Wherewithal shall a young man cleanse his way to keep it 
according to thy word ? " This translation gives precisely the force 

of the last clause. Hebrew punctuation lacks the interrogation 

21 



478 



PSALM CXIX. 



point, so that we have no other clew but the form of the sentence 
and the sense by which to decide where the question ends. 

10. "With my whole heart liaye I sought thee : O let me 
not wander from thy commandments. 

11. Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not 
sin against thee. 

To " hide in the heart " is not to conceal away even from his 
own view, but the very opposite : to put it in his memory, where it 
will be ever present and ready to guide his affections and pur- 
poses, and to rule his life. 

12. Blessed art thou, O Loed : teach me thy statutes. 

"What is the connection of thought between these two clauses ? 
Perhaps this : Thou, Lord, art infinitely blessed in thy purity, 
thy benevolence, in the perfection of thy entire moral nature. O 
lead me upward to that same moral perfection ! It is the noble 
purpose of thy revealed law to bring thy moral creatures up to 
thine own standard of purity. O help me to realize this purpose 
in my heart and life ! 

13. "With my lips have I declared all the judgments of 
thy mouth. 

14. I have rejoiced in the way of thy testimonies, as much 
as in all riches. 

15. I will meditate in thy precepts, and have respect unto 
thy ways. 

16. I will delight myself in thy statutes: I will not for- 
get thy word. 

The expression in v. 14 is strong — as much as in the sum total 
of all wealth — infinite riches. 

17. Deal bountifully with thy servant, that I may live, 
and keep thy word. 

Grant blessings upon thy servant, that long as I live I may keep 
thy word. We must not separate living from keeping God's word 
so as to make two petitions, one for life and one for obedience, but 
rather combine the two as above. 

18. Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous 
things out of thy law. 

"Open," in its primary sense of uncover, take away all obstruc- 
tions, i. e., to clear vision. "And I shall then see," seems more 

literal <ind exact. The Hebrew punctuators place a long pause 
here. Following their direction, we must make the last clause 
quite a distinct sentence, thus: "Wondrous things are from thy 
law." They are there, and I shall reach them when I shall search 
with undimmed vision. 



PSALM CXIX. 



479 



19. I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy command- 
ments from me. 

The returning exiles were in a sort strangers even in their 
father-land, and hence make a special appeal to the compassion of 
their God whose ancient statutes evinced such sympathy for " the 
stranger." 

20. My soul breaketh for the longing thai it hath unto thy 
judgments at all times. 

The words express most ardent desire. But "judgments" must 
not be restricted to retributive visitations, but should include God's 
precepts, as in v. 19, as well as inflictions of evil upon the wicked. 

21. Thou hast rebuked the proud that are cursed, which 
do err from thy commandments. 

22. Kemove from me reproach and contempt ; for I have 
kept thy testimonies. 

23. Princes also did sit and speak against me : but thy 
servant did meditate in thy statutes. 

24. Thy testimonies also are my delight, and my coun- 
selors. 

In v. 22 the words, "Koll away reproach and contempt," may be 
taken from Josh. 5: 9; but the thing thought of is probably the 
reproach and scorn which the feeble colony experienced from 

their wicked, insolent neighbors. The last clause of v. 24 has 

it, u The men of my counsel." The testimonies as to hi9 will, which 
God had given in his word, were as so many bosom friends to give 
him counsel. 

25. My soul cleaveth unto the dust : quicken thou me 
according to thy word. 

"Cleaveth to the dust," might express extreme humiliation; or, 
by a common Hebrew usage, drawing nigh to the grave, as in Ps. 
22 : 29. The prayer that follows for renewed life-power favors 
the latter sense. "According to thy word, i. e., of promise. 

26. I have declared my ways, and thou heardest me: 
teach me thy statutes. 

The word %< declare " has some shades of meaning not true to. 
the original here. The sense is : I have laid my case before 
thee, i. e., in prayer, and thou hast answered me " — answer rather 
than "hear" being the sense of the last verb. 

27. Make me to understand the way of thy precepts : 
so shall I talk of thy wondrous works. 

"So will I muse, meditate upon thy wondrous works " — is a more 
exact translation than "talk." It is also more useful toward one's 
spiritual health and life. 



480 



PSALM CXIX. 



28. My soul ruelteth for heaviness : strengthen thou me 
according unto thy word. 

29. Remove from me the way of lying : and grant me 
thy law graciously. 

30. I have chosen the way of truth : thy judgments have 
I laid before me. 

u Remove from me the way of lying " — a prayer to be saved from 
that sin — to be kept far aloof from that way of life. 

31. I have stuck unto thy testimonies : O Lord put me 
not to shame. 

32. I will run the way of thy commandments, when thou 
shalt enlarge my heart. 

"Stuck," though almost vulgar, is in no wise obscure. The 

last clause of v. 32 were better read, " For thou wilt enlarge my 

heart." According to the oriental ideas of straightness and 

largeness (see 118 : 5) we might conceive of this enlargement as 
consisting in conscious freedom and ease in the ways of piety. 
Thou wilt make it sweet and easy to run in the way of thy com- 
mands. See v. 45 below and notes there. 

33. Teach me, O Lord, the way of thy statutes ; and I 
shall keep it unto the end. 

34. Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law ; 
yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart. 

"Give me understanding" is not a prayer for more intellect, 
nor for more knowledge in general; but for more knowledge of 
God's word. "Cause me to understand" [it], "so shall I keep 
thy law" — law being what he would fain understand. 

35. Make me to go in the path of thy commandments ; 
for therein do I delight. 

36. Incline my heart unto thy testimonies, and not to 
covetousness. 

The prayer "Incline not my heart to covetousness" is of the 
same sort with this : M Lead us not into temptation," which by no 
means implies that God ever tempts men to evil (James 1 : 13), 
but only that we have occasion to beg his help to withstand such 
temptation. 

37. Turn away mine eyes from beholding vanity ; and 
quicken thou me in thy way. 

38. Stablish thy word unto thy servant, who is devoted to 
thy fear. 

" Vanity," in Hebrew usage has often special reference to idols 
and the accompaniments of idol worship. The Psalmist prays 
that he may never be permitted even to see such tempting ob- 



PSALM CXIX. 



481 



jccts. In v. 38 "word" refers to promise, " established " when 

fulfilled. In the last clause, the best critics suppose the word 

for "fear" to be used in the sense of fearers, thus: Confirm 
unto thy servant thy promise which is for thy fearers — given to 
those that fear thee. Others thus : Which promise is attached to 
the fear of thee, i. e. } pledged to holy obedience. 

39. Turn away my reproach which I fear : for thy judg- 
ments are good. 

40. Behold. I have longed 'after thy precepts : quicken 
me in thy righteousness. 

"Thy judgments are good; " why then should they fall on thy 
faithful servant? Yet I have cause to fear reproach : I pray thee 
in equity, let it pass over from me and come upon those who 
deserve it 

41. Let thy mercies come also unto me, O Lord, even* 
thy salvation, according to thy word. 

42. So shall I have wherewith to answer him that re- 
proacheth me : for I trust in thy word. 

43. And take not the word of truth utterly out of my 
mouth ; for I have hoped in thy judgments. 

In v. 42 there is a play upon the two senses of the term " word," 
thus: "And I will answer my revilers a word, for I have trusted 
in thy word." Having trusted in thy word of promise, I shall have 
a word of reply to make to them when thou shalt graciously hear 

this prayer. " Take not thy word of truth " ( i. e., of promise) 

out of my mouth ; let me have it still to speak of before my enemies 
and to rest upon for my own soul. If God were to fail in fulfilling 
this word of promise, it would, in the sense here contemplated, be 
quite taken out of his mouth. 

44. So shall I keep thy law continually forever and ever. 

45. And I will walk at liberty : for I seek thy precepts. 
" Walk at liberty; " literally, walk in a large place — a broad and 

easy path, God graciously fulfilling to me his promises, and my 
soul made strong and my steps guided wisely in his perfect way. 

46. I will speak of thy testimonies also before kings, and 
w T ill not be ashamed. 

47. And I will delight myself in thy commandments, 
which I have loved. 

48. My hands also will I lift up unto thy commandments, 
wdiich I have loved ; and I will meditate in thy statutes. 

" Speak of thy testimonies before kings " meets the case of Ezra 
(7: 1-27, and 8 : 22), also ofNehemjah (2 : 3-8).——" Lifting up the 
hands unto God's commandments" indicates the joyous heartiness 
with which he would seek and obey them. 



482 



PSALM CXIX. 



49. Kemember the word unto thy servant, upon which 
thou hast caused me to hope. 

50. This is my comfort in my affliction : for thy word 
hath quickened me. 

Remember that specific promise of thine, 0 Lord, by which thou 
didst inspire my hope. But some critics give the verse a more 
general construction, thus : " Remember the word spoken to thy 
servant, for thou hast raised my hope." The former seems more 
life-like, and being grammatically admissible, should be preferred. 

"This has been" [better than tl is"\\ "my comfort under my 

affliction," etc. Having had sweet experience in this line, I look 
to thee for yet more. 

51. The proud have had me greatly in derision : yet have 
I not declined from thy law. 

52. I remembered thy judgments of old, O Lord ; and 
have comforted myself. 

Outsiders scoffed at the builders of the city walls. See Neh. 2 : 

19, and 4 : 4. Also Ps. 123 : 3, 4. The scoffs of the proud have 

never tempted me from obeying thy law. Under such sharp temp- 
tations, I have thought of thy judgments all along the past ages, 
and so have comforted myself and have sustained my faith in thee. 
Those ancient "judgments" include all the manifestations of God 
in retribution, whether of evil upon the wicked or of good to the 
righteous. 

53. Horror hath taken hold upon me because of the 
wicked that forsake thy law. 

54. Thy statutes have been my songs in the house of my 
pilgrimage. 

"Horror" — the Hebrew word being very strong — hot indigna- 
tion, a burning in my very soul — hath seized upon me because of 
the wicked forsaking thy law. So far from feeling as they do, thy 
statutes have been the theme of my song in the house of my 
sojournings even in the desolate land of my Chaldean bondage. 

55. I have remembered thy name, O Lord, in the night, 
and have kept thy law. 

56. This I had, because I kept thy precepts. 

" Thy name," as usual, all those qualities of character expressed 
by the word " name." 1 have recalled to mind in my night medi- 
tations, and so, consequently, under their influence have I kept 
thy law. So fitly and sweetly the pious mind turns its thought to 
God in the stillness of the night-watches and finds itself sustained 
in keeping God's law. Such experiences are at least as ancient 
as Job, for in him we read — "But none [of the wicked] saith, 
Where is God, my Maker, who giveth songs in the night?" (35: 



PSALM CXIX. 



483 



10). This hath been my experience, saith the Psalmist, 

" because I kept thy precepts." 

57. Tkou art my portion, O Lord : I have said that I 
would keep thy words. 

"Portion," not, probably, in the sense of my chosen good; viz., 
God himself; but rather this : My function, my part, my accepted 
duty, O Lord, [I have said] is to keep thy word. Observe that the 
words " Thou art " are not in the original. 

58. I entreated thy favor with my whole heart ; be mer- 
ciful unto me according to thy word. 

U I entreated thy favor" — translates a very peculiar Hebrew 
verb, having the primary sense to stroke or smooth down the face, 
but used in the secondary sense of conciliating one's good will. 

59. I thought on my ways, and turned my feet unto thy 
testimonies. 

60. I made haste, and delayed not to keep thy command- 
ments. 

" I thought," meditated deeply, pondered upon my past life, and 
then turned — as the Hebrew verb suggests, in the active sense, 
caused my feet to turn unto thy testimonies. This might be called 
a metaphysical statement of genuine, thoughtful conversion. It is 
described yet more fully in the nest verse : " I made haste to keep 
thy commandments," and permitted no dangerous, sinful delay. 

61. The bands of the wicked have robbed me : but I have 
not forgotten thy law. 

"The bands" — the Hebrew word having usually the sense of 
cords, but admitting the sense of a file of men, a band or troop — 

the probable sense here. " Have environed," not " robbed," with 

some allusion to the case of the exiled people in Babylon. But 
even amid such perils I have not forgotten thy law. 

62. At midnight I will rise to give thanks unto thee, be- 
cause of thy righteous judgments. 

"Righteous judgments" — in the broad sense repeatedly noticed 
above — all God's manifestations in his retributive providence to- 
ward either the wicked or the righteous. In the deep night- 
seasons I will rise from my bed to give myself with the more 
fullness to thaksgiving and praise for thy great works in past ages. 
How admirable thus to sustain one's faith in God and enkindle 
the deepest, purest devotion! 

63. I am a companion of all them that fear thee, and of 
them that keep thy precepts. 

64. The earth, O Loud, is full of thy mercy : teach me 
thy statutes. 



434 



PSALM CXIX. 



" Companion," not loosely associated but most intimately. I am 

firmly knit together in heart with all who fear thee. That God's 

goodness so fills the earth (see v. 12), shining forth throughout all 
the ages in the history of man and revealing itself every-where in 
the face of nature, moves the Psalmist to the most intense desire 
to be taught his will respecting man's duty. O how I long to be 
conformed to the perfect will of One so infinitely good ! 

65. Thou hast dealt well with thy servant, O Lord, ac- 
cording unto thy word. 

66. Teach me good judgment and knowledge: for I have 
believed thy commandments. 

Literally, " Teach me goodness of judgment and knowledge," 

i, e., the very best of their kind, such as thy word imparts. 

"For I have confidence in thy word ;" I believe it to be from a 
perfect God, and therefore containing perfect wisdom and knowl- 
edge. Coming to thee with such faith in thee and in thy word, 
and with such longings to be taught of thee, thou wilt not thrust 
me away ! 

67. Before I was afflicted I went astray : but now have I 
kept thy word. 

"Was going astray" a sadly uniform experience with me; but 
ever since, I have kept thy word — a precious testimony to the 
wisdom and love of the Great Father in his corrective chastise- 
ments of his children — one to which thousands on thousands would 
readily subscribe their personal assent. This truth was signally 
exemplified in the Jews as a nation before and after the affliction 
of their great captivity. 

68. Thou art good and doest good: teach me thy statutes. 
Here again we meet with the tacit inference, so beautiful morally, 

that God being benevolent, full of that goodness which delights in 
doing good, therefore we may surely trust him to teach us his 
statutes for the purpose of molding us into his own moral image, 
and so securing to us the highest blessedness possible. 

69. The proud have forged a lie against me: but I will 
keep thy precepts with my whole heart. 

70. Their heart is as fat as grease ; but I delight in thy 
law. 

"Forged" well expresses the thought of the original — though 
patched up gives more exactly the figure involved in the word. 
They make up lies, drawing upon their imagination or invention, 
with no trouble about the facts. But such falsehoods shall not 
swerve me from uprightness. I give my whole heart none the 

less to the keeping of all thy precepts. The restored exiles had 

just this annoyance from the Samaritans and other adjacent tribes. 
"Their heart fat," i. e., dead as to moral sensibility and alto- 



PSALM CXIX. 



485 



gether alien from God through their pride. So " Jeshurun waxed 
fat and kicked" against God's authority (Deut. 32: 15). See also 
Job 15; 27, and Ps. 17 ; 10, and 73; 7. 

71. It is good for me that I have been afflicted; that I 
might learn thy statutes. 

72. The law of thy mouth is better unto me than thou- 
sands of gold and silver. 

The affliction of the whole captive people in Chaldea was their 
national salvation, radically curing them of their inveterate pro- 
pensity to idols, and bringing them to thorough repentance before 
God. The same law obtains toward individuals all down through 
the ages. Who has not drank the bitter cup of affliction, to learn 
thereby that, though bitter, it was spiritually tonic and restoring to 
the soul? No amount of gold and silver could work such spiritual 
cures — could so marvelously save the soul from death and bring 
the wanderer back to God. 

73. Thy hands have made me and fashioned me : give me 
understanding, that I may learn thy commandments. 

As thy hand and thine only has made and shaped my body — the 
material part of my nature — so let thy hand fashion my mind with 
knowledge and my heart in the moral sense with piety through thy 
word and Spirit. 

74. They that fear thee will be glad when they see me ; 
because I have hoped in thy word. 

75. I know, O Lord, that thy judgments are right, and 
that thou in faithfulness hast afflicted me. 

76. Let, I pray thee, thy merciful kindness be for my 
comfort, according to thy word unto thy servant. 

77. Let thy tender mercies come unto me, that I may live : 
for thy law is my delight. 

The same confidence in God's wisdom and love in afflicting his 
people which we saw above (vs. 67, 71) appears here also, looking 
back, we must suppose ; to the nation's experience in their recent 
captivity, yet covering the personal experience of all the true 
children of God ; for " what son is he whom his father chasten- 
eth not?" (Heb. 12: 5-11). 

78. Let the proud be ashamed : for they dealt perversely 
with me without a cause: but I will meditate in thy pre- 
cepts. 

"Be ashamed" — be put to shame for their wickedness. May 
God confound their schemes ; frustrate their plans so that they 
shall be filled with confusion ! 



486 



PSALM CXIX. 



79. Let those that fear thee turn unto me, and those 
that have known thy testimonies. 

80. Let my heart be sound in thy statutes ; that I be 
not ashamed. 

" Turn unto me." Though they may have lost confidence in me, 
yet let them see that thy favor and love are toward me, and come 

back to embrace me as thy child again. Let my heart be sound 

in thy statutes : so I shall never, like the wicked, be confounded 
and put to shame. 

81. My soul fainteth for thy salvation: but I hope in 
thy word. 

82. Mine eyes fail for thy word, saying, When wilt thou 
comfort me? 

83. For I am become like a bottle in the smoke: yet do I 
not forget thy statutes. 

"Fainteth for thy salvation" — wearied and exhausted with long- 
ing and waiting for it. ''Mine eyes fail" the same word which 

in v. 81 is translated "faint; " i. e., mine eyes are dim and almost 
blind with looking and longing for the fulfillment of thy words of 

promise. Bottles in the East were made of skins of animals, 

dried, and in the case supposed here, over the fire and in the 
smoke — of course wrinkled and blackened. His long protracted 
grief and trials gave him such a look. 

84. How many are the days of thy servant ? when wilt 
thou execute judgment on them that persecute me? 

85. The proud have digged pits for me, which are not 
after thy law. 

How long have I to live ? Alas, lest I may not live to see my 
cause vindicated as against my enemies, and myself delivered 

from their oppressions ! The proud who are reckless of thy law, 

and have no thought of ordering their life by it. The frequent 

recurrence in this Psalm of deep complaints against persecuting 
enemies gives us a strong impression of the annoyance and trial 
experienced by the restored Jews from their hostile neighbors. 
It will be remembered that this oppositioa arrested the building 
of the temple after the foundations were laid (Ezra 3-6) in the 
second year of Cyrus, so that it was not completed until the sixth 
year of Darius — an interval of some eighteen years. No wonder 
this should seem sadly long to those who loved God's law and wor- 
ship as ardently as the writer of this Psalm. 

86. All thy commandments are faithful: they persecute 
me wrongfully; help thou me. 

87. They had almost consumed me upon earth ; but I 
forsook not thy precepts. 



PSALM CXIX. 



487 



88. Quicken me after thy loving-kindness; so shall I 
keep the testimony of thy mouth. 

"Almost consumed me upon the earth" or land, for the word 
is used in either sense. "Consumed" is the word applied (vs. 
81, 82) to his "soul" and his "eyes" as being wasted away 
under his long affliction. — —"Quicken," i. e., enliven, give me 
fresh life ; renew my faith, and re-invigorate thereby my wasted 
body, for the word may well apply to both body and soul. 

89. Forever, O Lord, thy word is settled in heaven. 

90. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: thou hast 
established the earth, and it abideth. 

91. They continue this day according' to thine ordi- 
nances : for all are thy servants. 

Thy word is, as it were, anchored to thy throne, made fast and 
sure where no such changes as those of earth and earthly things 
can ever reach it. Hence it is safe to say, Thy faithfulness ex- 
tends to all generations ; no lapse of time, no passing away of hu- 
man generations can weaken its stability. Just as thou hast made 
the earth fast and it abideth, so are thy promises made fast and 
sure and will abide to the end. This comparison of God's faith- 
fulness in promise to the eternal stability of the heavenly bodies 
appears repeatedly in the Hebrew scriptures. See Jer. 31: 35-37, 

and 33: 20, 21, 25, 26, and Ps. 89 : 33-37. In v. 91, "they"— 

the earth and the heavenly bodies, continue to-day according to 
thine appointments, for "all," (Hebrew) 11 the all," i. e., the whole 
material universe, are thy servants, held for evermore to thy bid- 
ding. The tacit inference is, will not the great God whose works 
evince such stability, such fixedness of purpose, abide true to his 
promises given to his people? 

92. Unless thy law had been my delights, I should then 
have perished in mine affliction. 

93. I will never forget thy precepts : for with them thou 
hast quickened me. 

" Will never forget thy precepts ; " but manifestly in this con- 
nection the original word includes promise, and not law only. 

94. I am thine, save me ; for I have sought thy precepts. 
"I am thine," devoted to thy service, consciously committed to 

thy care ; and canst thou now forsake me ? I have sought to 
know and do thy will ; and moreover I have heard thy promises 
and have believed and trusted in them ; and now, shall they fail 
me? 

95. The wicked have waited for me to destroy me : but 
I will consider thy testimonies. 

In all this danger from wicked men plotting my destruction, I 



488 



PSALM CXIX. 



resort to thy. testimonies, and strive to comprehend their signifi- 
cance, and to encourage my soul therein. 

96. I have seen an end of all perfection : but thy com- 
mandment is exceeding broad. 

"I have seen an end of all perfection" elsewhere; no human 
thing is perfect; but thy law is absolute perfection; thy revealed 
word is complete, broad, deep, rich, meeting every requirement 
of human ■want. Here, as throughout this context, "command- 
ment," "precept," "law," etc., are to be taken in the comprehen- 
sive sense, including God's entire revelation, promise no less than 

precept. Moreover the context here seems to direct the thought 

in this verse rather to the perfection of God's law than to the per- 
fection of the writer's relation to it. His own imperfection, 
i whether of faith in God's promises, or of obedience to his pre- 
cepts, seems to be foreign from the scope of the context, so that 
Ave can not reasonably suppose he is speaking of either. 

97. O how love I thy law ! it is my meditation all the 
day. 

The one feature, prominent in this Psalm above every other, 
appears in its strength here — the love of God's law — a love at once 
sincere, deep, strong, quenchless, effective upon the activities of the 
mind since it prompts to continual study of the law — effective also 
upon his purposes of life, since it controls his life absolutely and 

universally. If we are asked to give a reasonable account for 

such love of God's law, we need only say — It deserves to be loved 
for its perfect purity and for its infinite rectitude and fitness ; it 
justly claims this honor as coming from our beneficent Father; it 
rightly commands our heart's love and appreciation as God's own 
means of restoring human souls to his perfect moral image. What 
higher reasons for loving any law can be even conceived ? Ask 
one who is humbly conscious of such love for God's law and of such 
longing for personal holiness in conformity with its spirit, and he 
will testify that no aspirations seem to him so reasonable ; that 
none other can be so blessed to himself ; that nothing else so per- 
fectly commends itself to his convictions. He only wishes this love 
were stronger and its fruits in his heart and life more abiding and 
more absolutely controlling. 

98. Thou through thy commandments hast made me wiser 
than mine enemies : for they are ever with me. 

99. I have more understanding than all my teachers : for 
thy testimonies are my meditation. 

100. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep 
thy precepts. 

Thus the Psalmist celebrates God's law as the fountain of all 
wisdom. He who studies it intensely — no matter if almost exclu- 
- sively — soon goes beyond his teachers, surpassing in wise under 



PSALM CXIX. 



489 



standing even the ancients. For God's written word was even then 
progressive, the new chapters giving a decided advantage to the 

modern student over the ancient. But especially let the reader 

note the conditions precedent to this surpassing proficiency in the 
study of God's law, viz., because " thy commandments are ever with 
me;" because "they are my meditation;" because "I keep thy 

precepts." V. 99 may look toward the sad corruption which 

manifested itself even in the priesthood in those times (Ezra. 10 : 
18, and Neh. 13 : 4-7, 28, 29). 

101. I have refrained my feet from every evil way, that 
I might keep thy word. 

102. I have not departed from thy judgments : for thou 
hast taught me. 

Of course there can be no keeping of God's law without this 
absolute refraining from evil ways. Holy ways and sinning ways 

can never have fellowship together. "Judgments" (v. 102) 

must include God's decisions as to man's duty, i. e., precepts, as 
well as penal inflictions. 

103. How sweet are thy words unto my taste ! yea, sweeter 
than honey to my mouth. 

104. Through thy precepts I get understanding : therefore 
I hate every false way. 

Such deep and yearning love for God's law makes even its words 
sweet. Precious associations cluster about them; they are music 
to the ear ; honey to the tongue ; beauty on the page. They give 
the best of understanding, viz., that which makes us hate and shun 
every false way. 

' 105. Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, and a light unto 
my path. 

Human life in the moral sense being often thought of as a 
"way," a " path," the figure which compares God's law to a lamp 
for the night and to sunlight for the day, is at once true to nature 
and full of beauty. 

106. I have sworn, and I will perform it, that I will keep 
thy righteous judgments. 

''Will perform," but the Hebrew is strictly, confirm; make it 
stand. The sentiment of the verse suggests the wisdom of renew- 
ing our consecration, but especially of ratifying it continually in 
the actual life. 

107. I am afflicted very much: quicken me, O Lord, 
according unto thy word. 

108. Accept, I beseech thee, the free-will offerings of my 
mouth, O Lord, and teach me thy judgments. 



490 



PSALM CXIX. 



" The free-will offerings of my mouth ; " prayers and praises, 
here tacitly compared to the thank-offerings and the voluntary (not 

specially prescribed) offerings under the Mosaic ritual. " Teach 

me thy judgments" — a point never lost sight of. 

109. My soul is continually in my hand : yet do I not 
forget thy law. 

110. The wicked have laid a snare for me: yet I erred 
not from thy precepts. 

To put one's soul or life in the hand is to expose it to specially 
imminent danger. The phrase is sufficiently explained in such 
passages as Judg. 12: 3, and 1 Sam. 19 : 5, and 28: 21. 

111. Thy testimonies have I taken as a heritage forever : 
for they are the rejoicing of my heart. 

112. I have inclined mine heart to perform thy statutes 
always even unto the end. 

"As an heritage" — as my inheritance, with some historic refer- 
ence to Canaan as promised to the patriarchs and their pos- 
terity. 

113. I hate vahi thoughts : but thy law do I love. 
Instead of "vain thoughts," this rare Hebrew word seems to 

mean — men of wavering, uncertain opinions; perhaps skeptics. 

114. Thou art my hiding-place and my shield : I hope in 
thy word. 

115. Depart from me, ye evil-doers : for I will keep the 
commandments of my God. 

"Depart from me, evil-doers;" I need not your sympathy; I 
repel your society, for I propose to obey God. 

116. Uphold me according unto thy word, that I may 
live : and let me not be ashamed of my hope. 

117. Hold thou me up, and I shall be safe : and I will 
have respect unto thy statutes continually. 

In conscious moral weakness he casts himself upon divinely 
promised help — most wisely ! 

118. Thou hast trodden down all them that err from thy 
statutes : for their deceit is falsehood. 

" Trodden down," should rather be despised, lightly esteemed. 
Such characters deserve to be held in dishonor, disgrace. 

119. Thou puttest away all the wicked of the earth like 
dross : therefore I love thy testimonies. 

The wicked of the earth are in society only as the dross to the 
genuine silver. God should have our thanks for his purifying 



PSALM CXIX. 



491 



work. It is remarkable that even from such a sentiment the 
Psalmist glides to the same almost constant result ; " Therefore I 
love thy testimonies." 

120. My flesh trembleth for fear of thee; and I am 
afraid of thy judgments. 

A keen sense of God's judgments on the wicked impresses a 
salutary fear of incurring his displeasure. Would it not be fearful 
to fall under the judgments of such a hand? 

121. I have done judgment and justice : leave me not to 
mine oppressors. 

As I have done right toward my fellow-men, leave me not to be 
wronged by them. The right which I have done to them, insure 
thou to me from thyself in return. 

122. Be surety for thy servant for good : let not the 
proud oppress me. 

The sense of this verb " Be surety for" appears in the case of 
Judah in behalf of his brother Benjamin (Gen. 43 : 9, and 44 : 32). 
The Psalmist prays that the Lord would stand his surety and 
guarantee, his safety against proud oppressors. 

123. Mine eyes fail for thy salvation, and for the word 

of thy righteousness. 

124. Deal with thy servant according unto thy mercy, 
and teach me thy statutes. 

125. I am thy servant; give me understanding, that I 
may know thy testimonies. 

" Fail for" — in the sense, long for, almost exhausted with pro- 
tracted waiting. "The word of thy righteousness," thy right- 
eous word, promising righteous dealing from a righteous God. 

126. It is time for thee, Loed, to work : for they have 
made void thy law. 

" Time for thee," Lord, to do something, to exert thy power and 
retrieve thy cause, for men are annulling thy law — not only violat- 
ing it themselves but breaking down its influence and making it 
of no account. A strong appeal ; often appropriate in this rebell- 
ious world ! A sad case of making void God's law appear in 

the history of Ezra and Nehemiah (Ezra 10 : and Neh. 13). 

127. Therefore I love thy commandments above gold; 
yea, above fine gold. 

128. Therefore I esteem all thy precepts concerning all 
things to he right ; and I hate every false way. 

The word " therefore " most probably is logically related, not to 
the one verse immediately preceding but to the general drift of 



492 



PSALM CXIX. 



thought in the Psalm; as if to say — For all these reasons I love 
thy commandments more than gold. 

129. Thy testimonies are wonderful; therefore doth my 
soul keep them. 

"Wonderful; " full of the wonders of wisdom; the wonders of 
power; the wonders of love. Good reason this why my soul 
should hold them continually in thought and affection that they 
may mold my heart and life into the divine image. 

130. The entrance of thy words giveth light ; it giveth 
understanding to the simple. 

The word translated "entrance" has more exactly the sense of 
opening, unfolding. Thy word of truth, thus opened, unfolded to 
the mind, enlightens it. The "simple" are the docile, the sim- 
ple-hearted, who honestly desire to know the truth, with a heart 
willing and joyful to obey. 

131. I opened my mouth, and panted : for I longed for 
thy commandments. 

Like one in the agonies of thirst, panting for cool, refreshing 
waters. 

132. Look thou upon me, and be merciful unto me, as 
thou usest to do unto those that love thy name. 

133. Order my steps in thy word : and let not any ini- 
quity have dominion over me. 

It has been God's method to bless those who love his name, a 
fact which inspires hope and encourages prayer. 

134. Deliver me from the oppression of man : so will I 
keep thy precepts. 

135. Make thy face to shine upon thy servant ; and teach 
me thy statutes. 

"Make thy face to shine upon thy servant;" i. <?., not only 
show me thy face, but let it shine, expressing not aversion, not 
displeasure, but merciful compassion, pitying love. Teach me how 
to live so that thy face may shine upon me evermore. 

136. Rivers of waters run down mine eyes, because they 
keep not thy law. 

The same state of heart which loves God's law intensely, and 
which perpetually cries, " Teach me thy law " — help me to keep 
it in all points with all my heart — is of course grieved exceedingly 

because multitudes do not keep but recklessly break it. This 

tender, weeping spirit appears conspicuously in the record of 
Ezra (9: 3-5, and 10: 1). The. people of Israel and even the 
priests had intermarried with idolaters ; " and when I heard this 



PSALM CXIX. 



493 



• 

tiling" (he writes) " I rent my garments and my mantle, and 
plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down 

astonished." " At evening sacrifice I fell upon my knees and 

spread out my hands unto the Lord my God and said, O my God, 
1 am ashamed and blush to lift up my face to thee my God : " and 
farther (10: 1), "When Ezra had prayed and when he had con- 
fessed, weeping and casting himself down before the house of 
God, there assembled unto him out of Israel a very great congre- 
gation of men, and women, and children ; for the people wept 
very sore." 

137. Kighteous art thou, 0 Lord, and upright are thy 
judgments. 

138. Thy testimonies that thou hast commanded are 
righteous and very faithful. 

139. My zeal hath consumed me, because mine ene- 
mies have forgotten thy words. 

140. Thy word is very pure : therefore thy servant 
loveth it. 

141. I am small and despised: yet do not I forget thy 
precepts. 

" My zeal hath consumed me," witnesses to the same tender 
compassion for sinners, blended with deep indignation toward sin, 

of which this Psalm presents so many expressions. " Thy word 

is very pure" — the term being borrowed from the smelting of ores 
to obtain the precious metals in their pure state. God's word is 
comparable to the purest silver or gold well refined. 

142. Thy righteousness is an everlasting righteousness, and 
thy law is the truth. 

143. Trouble and anguish have taken hold on me ; yet 
thy commandments are my delights. 

144. The righteousness of thy testimonies is everlasting : 
give me understanding and I shall live. 

Thy " righteousness " preserves its character forever with ho 
deterioration ; with no change. In my extreme distress, I find 
abiding delight in thy commandments. My relation to my God 
as his obedient child never fails to comfort me. 

145. I cried with my whole heart ; hear me, O Lord ; I 
will keep thy statutes. 

146. I cried unto thee ; save me, and I shall keep thy 
testimonies. 

147. I prevented the dawning of the morning, and cried : 
I hoped in thy word. 

148. Mine eyes prevent the night watches, that I might 
meditate in thy word. 



494 



PSALM CXIX. 



The word for " prevented " means either to come before or to be 
beforehand] i, e., to come into one's presence, or to be in advance 
of something. The former sense should probably be given to the 
word in v. 147 (as in Ps. 95 : 2) ; I come before God with the 
dawn of morning — as soon as the dawn appears. But in the next 
verse — Mine eyes anticipated the night-watches ; I was beforehand 
with them, meditating upon thy word and offering my prayer before 
they arrived. 

149. Hear my voice according unto thy loving-kindness : 
O Lord, quicken me according to thy judgment. 

Hear me in the spirit of thy loving-kindness, as in the exercise 
of thy great love thou art wont to hear the suppliant's cry. 

150. They draw nigh that follow after mischief : they are 
far from thy law. 

151. Thou art near, O Lord ; and all thy command- 
ments are truth. 

152. Concerning thy testimonies, I have known of old 
that thou hast founded them forever. 

The mischief-makers are near to me but far from thy law. That 
they are so near causes my danger and calls forth this prayer for 
thy help. But thou too art near, thou as well as they; and hence 
my hope. 

153. Consider mine affliction, and deliver me : for I do 
not forget thy law. 

154. Plead my cause, and deliver me: quicken me ac- 
cording to thy word. 

155. Salvation is far from the wicked : for they seek not 
thy statutes. 

The underlying assumption is that the Great Father will cer- 
tainly care for his obedient and trustful children, but not for the 
rebellious. The Psalmist pleads that he is one of the former 
class, and virtually begs that he may not receive the lot of the latter. 

156. Great are thy tender mercies, O Lord ; quicken 
me according to thy judgments. 

157. Many are my persecutors and mine enemies ; yet 
do I not decline from thy testimonies. 

158. I beheld the transgressors, and was grieved ; be- 
cause they kept not thy word. 

The fact that my persecutors are so many has not tempted me 
away from thy testimonies. I saw those perfidious traitors, ene- 
mies against God, and was li grieved," says the English version; 
but the Hebrew makes it stronger ; I was filled with loathing ; I 
felt sick and disgusted at heart with their conduct toward God. 



PSALM CXIX. 



495 



159. Consider how I love thy precepts : quicken me, O 
Lord, according to thy loving-kindness. 

160. Thy word is true from the beginning : and every one 
of thy righteous judgments endureth forever. 

" Consider that I love thy precepts," etc.; fail not to note this 

fact and to treat me accordingly. In v. 160, the Hebrew 

word translated " From the beginning," seems to mean simply, 
the head or the sum total, thus: The sum of thy word is truth; 
all is true. The English translators probably assumed an an- 
tithesis between the first clause and the last, thus : Thy word is 
true from the first; thy judgments endure unto the last, forever. 
The original does not express this antithesis. 

161. Princes have persecuted me without a cause : but my 
heart standeth in awe of thy word. 

162. I rejoice at thy word, as one that findeth great 
spoil. 

163. I hate and abhor lying: but thy law do I love. 
Under the persecution of the great I have feared not them but 

thee. My fear of thy -word has kept me from undue anxiety 
because of their hostile bearing, and also from unhallowed re- 
sentment. 1 hate, I abhor lying; but thy word is perfect 

truth, infinite sincerity; O how I love it for these qualities! 

164. Seven times a day do I praise thee, because of thy 
righteous judgments. 

165. Great peace have they which love thy law : and 
nothing shall offend them. 

"Seven times" — never so many ; an indefinite but large num- 
ber. "Nothing shall offend them" — cause them to stumble; 

become a stumbling-block; for they are preserved from strong 
temptation, or with every temptation a counteracting help appears 
and God delivers. 

166. Lord, I have hoped for thy salvation, and done thy 
commandments. 

The first clause expresses the aspiration of his soul ; the second, 
his performance of the conditions of success. He hopes for sal- 
vation, and to gain it, observes God's commandments — which is the 
only rational way. If any man wishes the Lord to save him, let 
him follow the Lord's directions. 

167. My soul hath kept thy testimonies ; and I love them 
exceedingly. 

168. I have kept thy precepts and thy testimonies ; for 
all my ways are before thee. 

This oft-repeated avowal of his obedience he makes in all sin- 



496 



PSALM CXX. 



cerity, remembering that his whole life and all the depths of his 
heart are ever more before God's eye. 

169. Let my cry come near before thee, O Lord : give 
me understanding according to thy word. 

170. Let my supplication come before thee : deliver me 
according to thy word. 

171. My lips shall utter praise, when thou hast taught 
me thy statutes. 

In v. 171, read — "My lips shall pour forth praise, /or thou wilt 
teach me thy statutes." I am confident of having this occasion for 
praise because thou Avilt certainly teach me. 

172. My tongue shall speak of thy word: for all thy 

commandments are righteousness. 

" My tongue shall answer thy word [saying] that all thy com- 
mandments are righteous," or, "for all thy commandments are 
right — the former to be preferred as harmonizing better with the 
verb to answer in the first clause. 

173. Let thine hand help me ; for I have chosen thy 
precepts. 

174. I have longed for thy salvation, O Lord ; and thy 
law is my delight. 

175. Let my soul live, and it shall praise thee; and let 
thy judgments help me. 

176. I have gone astray like a lost sheep : seek thy serv- 
ant ; for I do not forget thy commandments. 

The Psalmist closes here with comprehensive statements which 
sum up the great points expanded in detail in the body of the 

Psalm. In v. 176 the "lost sheep" represents (probably) 

rather suffering than sin. I have been lost as a perishing sheep — 
one ready to die: 0 seek and bring me home, "for I have not for- 
gotten" [preter tense] " thy commandments." Thus ends this 

rich and wonderful Psalm. It is pleasant to think how many thou- 
sands of God's people in every age since it was written have read 
its words, refreshed and quickened in every holy aspiration of faith 
in God's promise, of love for his word and of delight in his charac- 
ter. The humble, afflicted saint who wrote it might well rejoice 
that through God's blessing, the words God moved him to write 
have brought in such a harvest of the fruits of righteousness. 

PSALM CXX. 

A series of fifteen Psalms commences here (120-134) which 
are styled respectively "A song of degrees." Much critical labor 



PSALM CXX. 



497 



has been expended upon this word "degrees," * yet with very di- 
verse conclusions as to its meaning. The question has too little 
real importance to justify an elaborate discussion in this volume. 
Its importance is the less because the date and real authority of 

these captions hang in doubt. Passing the rejected theories, I 

fully accept the view advocated by Hengstenberg, Alexander, and 
many others as to the sense, viz., songs of the upgoings, i. e., songs 
prepared to be sung by the exiles returning from Babylon to 
Jerusalem, and also subsequently on their stated journeys going 
up to the holy city to attend the three great annual festivals. This 
theory accounts well, both for the leading thoughts and also for the 
local allusions found in these Psalms. The thoughts meet the 
case of the restored Jews and their re-established temple worship. 
This noun [ascents or upgoings] and its verb are used repeatedly 
for these goings up; the presence of the article [the ascents] favors 
its definite reference to some well known and established journeys 
like these; the oldest of these songs (Ps. 122) contains' these very 
words, naturally suggestive of the sense of this title : " Let us go 
into the house of the Lord" (v. 1); "whither the tribes go up," 
etc. (v. 4); and finally, such circumstantial allusions as appear 
(Ps. 121 : 1) show that they were approaching the holy city: "I 
will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help." 

Turning to the Psalm immediately before us, we may notice 

how aptly it portrays the condition of the restored exiles, e. g., 
Zerubbabel and Jeshua, Ezra and Nehemiah, prosecuting the 
great work of rebuilding the temple and city ; harassed by ma- 
lign and lying enemies who misrepresented and traduced them 
before the Persian court; compelled them to desist from their 
enterprise, and caused them long and most vexatious delays and 
immense trouble. The feelings of those godly men are brought 
out in this Psalm. 

1. In my distress I cried unto the Lord, and he heard me. 

2. Deliver my soul, O Lord, from lying lips, and from a 
deceitful tongue. 

This is their testimony. In their distress to whom should they 
go but to the Lord, their own Jehovah? Nehemiah (4: 4-9) gives 
us testimony to this effect; viz., that while Sanballat was wroth 
and Tobiah the Ammonite scoffed and taunted, he lifted up his 
prayer — " Hear, O our God, for we are despised," etc. (v. 4) ; 
" We. made our prayer unto our God" (v. 9). 

3. What shall be given unto thee ? or what shall be done 
unto thee, thou false tongue ? 

4. Sharp arrows of the mighty, with coals of juniper. 
What retribution is due to thee, false, lying man? Himself 

makes answer—" Sharp arrows of the mighty warrior, with coals 




498 



PSALM CXXI. 



of juniper" — a plant of the desert, reputed the best material for 
charcoal — supposed to be the genista, a species of broom. The 
idea is — sharp arrows and burning coals are their deserved punish- 
ment. 

5. Woe is me, that I sojourn in Mesech, that I dwell in 
the tents of Kedar ! 

Alas for me that I am destined to live among such wicked 

men! The name " Meshech " is associated (Ezek. 27: 13) with 

Javan and Tubal, and (Ezek. 38 : 2, 3) with Gog and Tubal ; in both 
cases representing the savage, brutal hordes of Northern Asia : while 
"Kedar" in like manner represents the rude people of the Southern 

Arabian desert. " Not dwell in the tents of Kedar" butw^A, L e., 

among, in the midst of, such savage, godless tribes. Yet probably 
these names are to be taken as representing their character rather 
than as indicating the precise nationality of their enemies, as the 
terms "Vandal" and " Cossack" are sometimes used in our age. 

6. My soul hath long dwelt with him that hateth peace. 

7. I am for peace : but when I speak, they are for war. 
"My soul" — for I myself; yet with the implied thought that 

dwelling among such haters of peace was a bitter grief to his very 

soul. "1 am peace" — all peace, in the strong words of the 

original, but when I speak with them of peace, in soothing words 
and a conciliatory spirit, they are full of war. Such is the contrast 
between my spirit and theirs ! Think of the trial of living among 
such neighbors! Such was the very trial of the restored exiles, 
living between and among Samaritans, Ammonites, Edomites — 
all barbarous, godless, and intensely hostile to the Jews. 

PSALM CXXI. 

This Psalm naturally follows Ps. 120. That has the tone of 
distress, solicitude, trouble, as of one looking forth anxiously for 
relief. This brings the promise of all desired relief and protec- 
tion. The caption [in Hebrew] varies slightly from the normal 

form, being not, as usual, " a song of the ascents," but for the 
ascents, i. e., adapted to be sung by parties going up to the holy 
city. The other form, however, has essentially the same meaning. 

The first verse suggests that this song would be appropriate just 

when they came in sight of the sacred summits. 

1. I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence 
cometh my help. 

2. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven 
and earth. 

The last clause of v. 1 is, by Hebrew usage of the words, inter 



PSALM CXXI. 



499 



rogative, with a pause preceding, thus: "I will lift up mine eyes 
to the hills: Whence shall my help come?" Then v. 2 gives the 
answer, viz., "From Jehovah, Maker of heaven and earth" — 
abundantly able therefore to protect and help his trustful people 
to the extent of their utmost wants. "Who can be more mighty 
than he, the Great Maker of earth and heaven ? 

3. He will not suffer thy foot to be moved : he that 
keepeth thee will not slumber. 

4. Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber 
nor sleep. 

"Let him not suffer thy foot to be moved," i. e., to slide from its 
proper place — a very appropriate specification of danger to the 
foot-traveling pilgrim over the rocky ways of the hills and ravines 
of Palestine. It should be noted that v. 3 is prayer, not affirma- 
tion ; while v. 4 is promise, assurance : " Let him not suffer ; let 
him not slumber; " but v. 4; "Behold, He, the Keeper of Israel, 

will not slumber," etc. Nehemiah in his history of his times (4: 

7-23) suggests that their faith was coupled with works, for " we 
made our prayer unto our God [first], and also set a watch against 
them day and night because of them" [a specimen of their 
works]. 

5. The Lord is thy keeper : the Lord is thy shade upon 
thy right hand. 

6. The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by 
night. 

"The Lord thy shade," throwing over thee the grateful shelter 
which thou mayest need. "At thy right hand" follows the usual 
conception of friendly help. This shade will avert the sun-stroke in 
the heats of day, and whatever malarious or otherwise harmful 
influences may imperil you by night. There is no occasion to 
assume that the Scriptures indorse the notion of noxious influence 
from the moon itself, Night, with or without moon, brings more 
or less that is noxious, and the form of the expression here may be 
otherwise accounted for without supposing any indorsement of 
human superstitions about the moon. 

7. The Lord shall preserve thee from all evil : he shall 
preserve thy soul. 

8. The Lord shall preserve thy going out and thy 
coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. 

"Thy going out and thy coming in" — equivalent to the entire 
activities and exposures of human life. The phrase takes form 
from the habits of laborers, going out for the day ; coming in for 
the night. — -—"From this time forth and even for evermore," mani- 
festly looks onward beyond the bound of this earthly life. The 
writer might have said—Through all your days ; long as you live ; 



500 



PSALM CXXII. 



but he did not say that merely, but that first and much more ; even 
through the long forever which is the inheritance of all whom God 

has made in his own image. 

x-^oc 

PSALM CXXII. 

This Psalm, full of the sweet inspirations of love for the house 
of the Lord and for the scenes of worship there, is one of the 
41 songs of the ascents " — every thought and sentiment in it being 
adapted to the case of Hebrew families joyfully setting forth on 
their stated pilgrimage to the holy city to join in the prescribed 
worship of stated festivals. It is ascribed to David as the author. 
This view is supported by the reference to " the tribes," as if they 
were all then in the habit of going up ; and by the compactness of 
the city which was solidly built by David, but in the age of the 
restoration was small and thinly peopled. Somewhat against the 
theory that David wrote the Psalm is the use of the peculiar idiom 
which abbreviates the relative answering to ichich, so as to write 
fully only its middle consonant. The simple facts in regard to 
this idiom are that it is not found in the first forty-one Psalms, 
[Book I], nor in the Psalms of David which appear in Book II, and 
occurs only in very rare instances in the Hebrew written before 
the exile, but becomes somewhat common afterward. The prob- 
lem of its appearance here in a Psalm written by David is solved 
if we may assume that the scribes of the age of Ezra in revising 
the Psalm for use in their times allowed themselves to introduce 

this form as being then more common and more acceptable. 

The tone of the Psalm was admirable for the times of the restora- 
tion when the religious life of the colonists was energized and 
needed to be by the solemnities of their newly restored and lovely 
Zion. 

1. I was glad when they said unto me, Let us go into the 
house of the Lord. 

2. Our feet shall stand within thy gates, O Jerusalem. 
"When they said" is not the exact grammatical construction of 

the original, but rather this: "I rejoiced with those who said, let 
us go," etc. I rejoiced as they did, in a common sympathy. All 
our hearts were glad together. It was a joyful day when the 
word went round—" Let us go up to the house of the Lord and to 

the holy city! Xot, " our feet shall stand," as if the words were 

spoken prospectively as they left their homes; but our feet are 
standing — have already been planted within thy gates, 0 Jerusa- 
lem ; for they are now already there, or, at least, suppose them- 
selves to be. 

3. Jerusalem is builded as a city that is compact together : 



PSALM CXXIII. 



501 



4. Whither the tribes go up, the tribes of the Lord, unto 
the testimony of Israel, to give thanks unto the name of the 
Lord. 

5. For there are set thrones of judgment, the thrones of 
the house of David. 

The pilgrims are impressed with the magnificence of the city, 

which some of them perhaps have entered for the first time. 

" Unto the testimony of Israel," would be more intelligible if 
translated as it should be — according to the law or ordinance for 
Israel — with reference to the national statute which required all 
the males of Israel to appear at the holy place three times each 
year. See particularly Deut 16: 16, and Ex. 23 : 17, and 34: 23. 
This word rendered " testimony " has often the sense of statutes. 

" Thrones for judgment," the civil law as well as religious 

being administered there. 

6. Pray for the peace of Jerusalem : they shall prosper 
that love thee. 

7. Peace be within thy walls, mid prosperity within thy 
palaces. 

8. For my brethren and companions' sakes, I will now 
say, Peace be within thee. 

9. Because of the house of the Lord our God I will seek 
thy good. 

" Peace," in the broad sense of general prosperity. " For the sake 
of my brethren and friends, O let me say, Peace be within thee." 
The word "now" does not mean time, but only entreaty, express- 
ing prayer more intensely — O let me say, Be thy peace great! 
Let peace always abide in this dear Zion ! Because God's house 
is here, my prayer shall ascend for blessings on this city of his 

abode. The social element in the ancient Hebrew worship is 

noticeable and delightful : For the sake of my brethren and friends 
let me pray for perpetual blessings on our Zion ! 

PSALM CXXIII. 

This Psalm appositely fits the case of the returned exiles, ex- 
periencing the keenest insult and contempt from their Samaritan 
neighbors. There is no need of looking elsewhere for its date 

or occasion. It makes two main points : How we lift up our 

eyes unto the Great Lord above, and why ; under what stress of 
trial, viz., the reproach and scorn which fills and oppresses our 
souls. The infant colony was feeble ; their enemies strong, and 
as the history shows, very insulting, e.g., saying of the people, 
"What do these feeble Jews?" and of the city walls they were re- 
building: "If a fox go up he shall even break down their stone- 
22 



502 



PSALM CXXIV. 



wall" (Neh. 4: 1-3). The history records that this contempt 
brought them to God in prayer: ''Hear, O our God, for we are 
despised," etc. The Psalm before us develops their feelings yet 
more fully. 

1. Unto thee lift I up mine eyes, O thou that dwellest 
in the heavens. 

2. Behold, as the eyes of servants look unto the hand of 
their masters, and as the eyes of a maiden unto the hand 
of her mistress ; so our eyes ivait upon the Lord our God, 
until that he have mercy upon us. 

" Lifting up the eye unto God" is one of the most natural indi- 
cations of prayer, one which appears often in the Psalms. 

Beautifully God is addressed as one dwelling, or as the Hebrew 

suggests, sitting enthroned in the heavens. The servant's eye 

directed continually to the hand of his master suggests the two- 
fold relation of dependence and of service. The servant looks up 
hopefully for all needed help, waiting also for continually recur- 
ring intimations of the master's will as to service. So our eye is 
unto God. 

3. Have mercy upon us, O Lord, have mercy upon us : 
for we are exceedingly filled with contempt. 

4. Our soul is exceedingly filled with the scorning of 
those that are at ease, and with the contempt of the proud. 

" Exceedingly filled with contempt " — the Hebrew words sug- 
gesting that they were sated with it; had more than enough; 
more than they knew well how to bear. We may suppose that 
they feared from such enemies something more and worse than 
merely contempt. The history shows that their enemies thought 
to try scorn first, and this failing, violence. Hence the cry for 
mercy and for help. 

PSALM CXXIV. 

Like Ps. 122 this "song of the ascents" bears the name of 
David as author ; and like that also it has two cases of that pe- 
culiar idiom of the relative pronoun which indicates a later hand. 
In this case as in that, we may suppose the Psalm originally 
David's, but slightly modified to adapt it to the idioms of the times 

of the restoration. The sentiment is remarkably congenial to 

the spirit of David : No help for me save in God. But for his 
help, how surely — nay, how many times — I should have perished 
utterly. The same conscious dependence on God filled the hearts 
of the leading men of the restoration. 



PSALM CXXV. 



503 



1. If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, now 
may Israel say ; 

2. If it had not been the Lord who was on our side, when 
men rose up against us : 

3. Then they had swallowed us up quick, when their 
wrath was kindled against us : 

4. Then the waters had overwhelmed us, the stream had 
gone over our soul : 

5. Then the proud waters had gone over our soul. 

In v. 1, the last clause would be more true to the original, thus : 

"O let Israel say." "Swallowed us up quick " — not in the sense 

suddenly, but in the ancient sense of living, alive. They would 
have engulfed us alive in their pit of destruction. The force of 
this language is readily seen in the fact that David usually and 
the restored exiles always had to contend against foes in a human 
and military point of view stronger than themselves. 

6. Blessed be the Lord, who hath not given us as a 
prey to their teeth. 

7. Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the 
fowlers : the snare is broken, and we are escaped. 

8. Our help is in the name of the Lord, who made 
heaven and earth. 

The figure under which their enemies are presented changes 
suddenly from a drowning flood to ravenous wild beasts, and then 
to hunters insnaring their prey. The u breaking of the net " ap- 
plies aptly to the fall of Babylon before Cyrus, which was the 
means of their political redemption. That wonderful event broke 
the snare and let the exiles escape — adding another testimony to 
the great and oft developed truth that Israel's help is and ever 
has been in the name — the glorious attributes — of the great and 
true Jehovah, who, being the Maker of heaven and earth, has 
ample resources for the redemption of his chosen. 

PSALM CXXV. 

Both the sentiments and the figures of this "song of the as- 
cents " concur in dating it during the revival age of the restora- 
tion. The pilgrims, coming up to their annual solemnities, 
greeted the hill-tops of Mt. Zion from afar, and saw there a sym- 
bol of the firmness and stability of Jehovah's promises — good for 
all those who trusted in him. 

1. They that trust in the Lord shall be as mount Zion, 
which can not be removed, but abideth forever. 



504 



PSALM CXXV. 



2. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the 
Lord is round about his people from henceforth even for- 
ever. 

"Abideth forever" — sits on her deep, immovable foundations. 
So firm is the standing, so safe the state of those who trust with 
serene and steadfast faith in Jehovah, the God of the covenant and 
of its promises. The realm of nature furnishes no figure for 
stability more fine and perfect than the mountain on his base. 
Oceans are tossed about by tempests ; the grand old cedars come 
down at last ; the clouds are fickle; man's mightiest works of art 
pass away ; but the mountains are always firm to the human foot — 
are always there, quietly and grandly reposing on their changeless 

foundations. So are they who trust steadfastly in their God. 

In v. 2, the figure varies slightly. The mountains stand like mili- 
tary ramparts round about Jerusalem, encircling and defending: 
so God is a wall of circumvallation all round about his peopie. 
The form of the Hebrew sentence is abrupt, but expressive: 
"Jerusalem: the mountains are round about her, and the Lord is 
round about his people." 

3. For the rod of the wicked shall not rest upon the lot 
of the righteous ; lest the righteous put forth their hands 
unto iniquity. 

The "rod" is an emblem of authority, power. The "lot" rep- 
resents all the interests, all that makes up the state, of the right- 
eous — the sentiment being that the wicked shall not be allowed to 
hold power over the righteous. The reason is, lest the righteous 
be tempted beyond their virtue to resort to iniquity in resisting 
such rule. In this connection, the fact is one manifestation of 
God's care of his trustful people. He will not leave them forever 
— perhaps the sense is not long, under the rod of the wicked. The 
trial of his people under proud Babylon was terrible. In mercy 
the Lord cut it short in due time. 

4. Do good, O Lord, unto those that be good, and to them 
that are upright in their hearts. 

5. As lor such as turn aside unto their crooked ways, 
the Lord shall lead them forth with the workers of ini- 
quity : bat peace shall be upon Israel. 

With full heart the Psalmist prays, (and invites all to join) for 
all good to be given to the good, but for such as turn aside from 
righteous to morally crooked ways, he can only say — The Lord 
will give them their portion according to their works — with those 
of their own class, feo it must be. How can praying men, living 
in sympathy with God and righteousness, offer any other prayer 
as to the final doom of sinners whom the richest offered mercy 
fails to reclaim ? 



PSALM CXXVI. 



505 



PSALM CXXVI. 

This Psalin bears on its face strong evidence of having been 
written after the restoration of some of the exiles, and while yet 
there were others to come. The vivid description of the feelings 
and sensations of the people indicates that their restoration was 
then recent and fresh in mind. 

1. When the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, 
we were like them that dream. 

The word for " captivity " is taken by many able critics to be the 
abstract for the concrete; i. e., captivity for captives, thus : " When 

the- Lord restored to their homes the captives of Zion." We 

could scarcely believe our senses. As in dreams we see things 
too good to be true and seem to be living a charmed life yet lack- 
ing the sense of reality; so were we when the proclamation went 
forth from the throne of Cyrus; Return ye to your ancient home. 

In the lapse of seventy years the hope of restoration to their 

land, so long deferred, had mostly gone out in despair, save as it . 
rested (in some minds) on their faith in God's promise. The pol- 
icy of those great powers in the East had long been settled, viz., 
to break up the old tribes and kingdoms of Western Asia ; take 
the people into far eastern countries, and never let them return. 
No nation known to history, except the Jews, ever did return to 
rebuild their ancient cities and homes. Hence this joyous sur- 
prise. 

2. Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our 
tongue with singing: then said they among the heathen, 
The Lord hath done great things for them. 

3. The Lord hath done great things for us ; ivhereof we 
are glad. 

Strong words are these — our mouth full of laughter ; our tongue 
full of loud shouts of joy (Hebrew). Even the heathen said, 
"The Lord their God hath magnified his doings for this people." 

V. 3, may be read at least equally well without the word 

" whereof," thus : " The Lord hath done great things for us : we 
are happy." We icere sad; wretched ; but mark the change : "we 
are full of joy now." 

4. Turn again our captivity, O Lord, as the streams in 
the south. 

This seems to be a prayer for the return of yet other captives. 
Let their restoration be as when from the Northern hills of Pal- 
estine and Syria, the waters flow southward, and fill the long 

empty river channels of the South. The Hebrew word for 

"streams" means strictly a river's bed, the channel which holds 
water when water is there, but is often dry. Naturally there is 



506 



PSALM CXXVII. 



joy for the husbandmen -when those valley-beds are filled again 
with flowing waters. So, the prayer is, let thy people return joy- 
fully to their father-land. 

5. They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy. 

6. He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious 
seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing 
his sheaves with Mm. 

The return of the rainy season suggests seed-sowing. But seed- 
sowing has in it more or less of anxiety, solicitude; for who at 
that stage knows certainly that his seed will return to him at all — 
much less, with manifold increase ? The sowing time therefore 
is not the hour for the song of "harvest home." But God's ways 
in providence are shaped to minister faith and hope to the seed- 
sower, justifying the proverb ; " They that sow in tears shall reap 
with songs of joy." The Psalmist beautifully expands this prov- 
erb : " He that goes forth with his burden of seed, weeping as 
he goes, will surely come back with shouts of joy, bearing the 
sheaves of his harvest." The seed that is sown, wet with the tears 
• of solicitude, care, and prayer, brings" a sure and glorious harvest 
at length. This is even more universally true in spiritual labor 
than in material — more true of labors for truth and for the souls 
of men than in labors for " the bread that perisheth." Christian 
labor that takes hold of the heart's deepest sensibilities, that 
means earnestness and real work, that is sustained by faith in the 
mighty God and has the witness of tears, can not fail of fruitage 
in its due season. The shouts of the "harvest home" will be as 

the tears of sowing time. The translation "precious" applied 

to " seed" can scarcely be justified from the original. The He- 
brew word means, the drawing out of seed, or the scattering it in 
the furrow, the sense being — " He that goes forth with tears, scat- 
tering his seed as he goes," etc. Compare Amos 9: 13, for the 

use of this word. These verses had a forcible and instructive 

illustration in the tearful captives of Babylon, coming home at 
length to the joyful ingatherings of their father-land. 

PSALM CXXVII. 

This "song of the ascents" is ascribed in the usual form to 
Solomon as its author. As written by him it had a pertinent 
reference to the building of the first temple. The builders of the 
second had even more reason to feel their entire dependence on 
God for help, and therefore would appreciate the fitness and force 
of this ode for their times. Hence they wisely brought it forward 
into their compilation of this last book of Psalms. 

1. Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain 



PSALM CXXVII. 



507 



that build it : except the Lokd keep the city, the watch- 
man waketh but in vain. 

" The house " means primarily the temple, the house of God, 
this being the usual Hebrew word for the temple. To the men of 
the restoration the rebuilding of the temple was a heavy work : 
the guarding of their city against hostile assaults involved 
anxious care. AVhat could they do without God as their strong 
helper? 

2. It is vain for you to rise up early, to sit up late, to eat 
the bread of sorrows : for so he giveth his beloved sleep. 

It is vain for you to be early to rise and late to rest, eating the 
bread of hard labor (Hebrew). "So," i e., all this, "God will 
give to his beloved with sleep." The beloved of God who trust his 
care and enjoy his blessings, shall obtain their bread alone? with 
needful sleep — i. e., bread, and sleep besides — without sacrificing 
sleep to excessive unreasonable toil. So I prefer, on the whole, to 
interpret this somewhat difficult clause. Some have given it this 
turn: "So," i. e., by means of severe labor, God gives his beloved 
sleep — the fatigue of their toil preparing them for sound sleep in 

its season. Against this construction lie these objections : (a) 

That all hard laborers, and not God's beloved only or specially, get 

sleep out of hard toil. (b) It supposes God's beloved to get 

good from a course declared to be " vain." 

3. Lo, children are a heritage of the Loed : and the fruit 
of the womb is his reward. 

4. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are 
children of the youth. 

As in the building of the great " house" [the temple] and in the 
guarding of the city, so in the rearing of a family God's blessing 

and this only insures the desired result. '"Children of the 

youth" are children born to parents in their early years rather 
than in their old age. The thought seems to be not only that such 
sons and daughters are usually more vigorous, but that their vigor 
turns to better account for the" aid of their fathers. 

5. Happy is the man that has his quiver full of them ; 
they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the 
enemies in the gate. 

" Shall speak with the enemies in the gate," contemplates not 
conflicts at arms but controversies at law in the courts, held in 
the gates of the city. The father, powerfully flanked with stalwart 

sons, is strong for such encounters. Such sentiments were timely 

in the age of the restoration, for increase of population was a first 
necessity to the stability and permanence of the infant colony. 



508 



PSALMS CXXVIII— CXXIX. 



PSALM CXXVIII. 

This short Psalm takes up and expands the sentiment with which 
Ps. 127 closed. Obviously the state of the infant colony sufficiently 
accounts for the interest felt in these thoughts. Zech. 8 is rich 
and fragrant with promises of the same sort of blessings: "The 
streets of the city shall be full of boys and girls playing in the 
streets thereof." 

1 . Blessed is every one that feareth the Lord ; that 
walketh in his ways. 

2. For thou shalt eat the labor of thine hands : happy 
shalt thou be, and it shall be well with thee. 

Thase family blessings are the reward of true piety. V. 2 is 

better read — " When thou shalt eat the labor of thy hands, happy 

shalt thou be therein and all shall be well with thee. We must 

not fail to notice the special force of this idea as seen in the light 
of the facts of history in the times of Ezra and Nehemiah respect- 
ing ungodly intermarriages with heathen wives. This was wide 
and far from the fear of the Lord. Note how solemnly and 
earnestly those pious men protested with tears and persistent 
rebukes (Ezra 9 and 10, and Neh. 13 : 23-30). 

3. Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine by the sides of thine 
house : thy children like olive plants round about thy table. 

4. Behold, that thus shall .the man be blessed that feareth 
the Lord. 

Beautiful figures these, and beautiful the realities they represent. 
"Behold; " take note of the facts; the man who feareth the Lord 
shall reap these blessings as his reward. 

5. The Lord shall bless thee out of Zion : and thou shalt 
see the good of Jerusalem all the days of thy life. 

6. Yea, thou shalt see thy children's children, and peace 
upon Israel. 

Thou shalt joyfully behold not only a lovely growing family of 
thine own, but the good of the holy city, all thy days^ children's 
children for thyself and the peace of Israel besides. 

PSALM CXXIX. 

This song sweeps its eye over the historic past of Israel, bring- 
ing back this one great moral lesson — that though their enemies 
had afflicted them sorely, yet their God had always interposed in 
their time of need. This view of the past calls forth the trustful 



PSALM CXXIX. 



509 



prayer that God would frustrate the schemes of their enemies in 
all future time. 

1. Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth, 
may Israel now say : 

2. Many a time have they afflicted me from my youth : 
yet they have not prevailed against me. 

3. The ploughers ploughed upon my back : they made 
long their furrows. 

The youth of Israel as a nation was spent in Egypt, much of it 
in political bondage. Then and all along at intervals onward 
their enemies had oppressed them greatly — much, the Hebrew 
word primarily means ; but in this historic review, it may include 
frequency as well as severity. — ■-— " O let Israel say " — the word 
for "now " having no reference to time, but being only a word of 

entreaty. Yet gratefully to God let me say, " They have not 

been able," i. e., to destroy me. They have scourged me sorely, 
" ridging my back with their furrows " — where the wounds of the 
savage scourge are compared to the ridges of a plowed field. 

4. The Lord is righteous : he hath cut asunder the cords 
of the wicked. 

The Lord is righteous, and therefore interposed to arrest oppres- 
sion : he cut off the cords — the tugs by which the figurative plow 
on my back was drawn. This construction has at least the merit 
of keeping up the figure to the end. To cut the cords by which 
the scourging, i. <?., the plow, was worked, broke down their power. 
No other sense of the word " cords " is* germain to the figure before 
the mind. 

5. Let them all be confounded and turned back that 
hate Zion. 

6. Let them be as the grass upon the house-tops, which 
withereth afore it groweth up : . 

7. Wherewith the mower filleth not his hand ; nor he 
that bindeth sheaves his bosom. 

8. Neither do they which go by say, The blessing of the 
Lord be upon you : we bless you in the name of the Lord. 

Grass on oriental house-tops is of necessity short-lived, the soil 
for roots being the least amount which would admit any growth at 
all. With the first abatement of the rain and .the first warm rays 

of the sun, it must wither. Not " afore it groweth" — for this 

construction would preclude grass altogether; but before one 
plucks it, i. <?., it withers of itself, under the agencies of nature, 

and without human hands to pluck it up.- Still carrying forward 

the supposed case — with such grass no mower fills his hands ; no 
binder of sheaves his arm ; the passers by could have no heart to 
say to men harvesting such grass — "The Lord's blessing be on 



510 



PSALM CXXX. 



you." Let all the endeavors, all the results of them that hate 

Zion, be like such an utter abortion ! The story of Ruth (2 : 4) 

furnishes a beautiful case of the good wishes and pious responses 
of men in the midst of harvest bounty. 

PSALM CXXX. 

This group of songs for the ascents, to be sung on the way up to 
the holy city, would be quite incomplete without at least one of 
penitential character, confessing sin and imploring forgiveness. 
For the nation had been fearfully guilty before God and were then 
beginning to enjoy the mercy of restoration to their father-land 
only because they had penitently sought forgiveness. Therefore, 
let them recall those confessions and prayers — nay more, renew 
them, before the Lord. Who has not abundant occasion for such 
confessions and for such prayers ? 

1. Out of the depths have I cried unto thee, O Lord. 

2. Lord, hear my voice : let thine ears be attentive to 
the voice of rny supplications. 

"Out of the depths," L e., of sorest affliction — as one in deep 

waters overborne with sorrow. Let thine ears be attentive — 

quickened to thoughtful hearing. 

3. If thou, Lord, shouldest mark iniquities, O Lord, 
who shall stand ? 

4. But there in forgiveness with thee, that thou mayest be 
feared. 

K Shouldest mark iniquities " — shouldest watch for them — the 
same word which is used below of those who " watch for the morning." 

t; Who shall stand?" — in the sense either of standing up in 

self-vindication, or standing under the infliction of deserved 

punishment. Who could do either — defend, or endure ? But 

forgiveness is possible to thee — thy purpose in it being to beget 
true piety. Thou forgivest the suppliant sinner in order that, 
being forgiven, he may be drawn and held forever by gratitude 
and love to a life of godly fear. u For the love of Christ con- 
straineth." The moral power of clemency, forgiving mercy, sur- 
passes all other moral power toward producing the new life of 
reverence and loving obedience. 

5. I wait for the Lord, my soul doth wait, and in his 
word do I hope. 

6. My soul ivaiteth for the Lord more than they that 
watch for the morning : I say, more than they that watch for 
the morning. 



PSALM CXXXI. 



511 



"My soul doth wait" — equivalent to saying, I wait with all my 

soul — earnestly. In his word of promise do I hope. As the 

lost traveler, or the imperilled sea-faring men watch and long for 
the morning light, so and more than so does my soul watch and 
wait for the light of God's face. 

7. Let Israel hope in the Lord, for with, the Lord 
there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption. 

8. And he shall redeem Israel from all his iniquities. 
Literally, " 0 Israel, hope thou in the Lord" — the ground of 

inspiring hope being that with him pardoning mercy is much, 
great, plenteous ; it comes not in scanty measure, but in measure 
abundant : not from reluctant hand and heart, but from a full hand 
and overflowing heart ! And he will forgive penitent Israel all her 
sins! 

PSALM CXXXI. 

David's name is at the head of this short Psalm. If we ask to 
what point of time in his history it may be supposed to have spe- 
cial reference, Psalm 132 and its scenes will suggest as the an- 
swer — The bringing of the ark from Kirjath-Jearim [Ephrath] up 
to the hill of Zion (see 2 Sam. 6). The awe-inspiring calamity on 
Uzzah might naturally impress David with a sense of God's holi- 
ness and majesty, and suggest that no other spirit than that of 
most profound humility could be pleasing to him, or could come 

with safety so near the symbol of his glorious presence. It was 

vital to cherish the same reverent awe of God's ark and sanctuary 
among the restored exiles as they were re-establishing the worship 
of God in his sanctuary. 

1. Lord, my heart is not haughty, nor mine eyes lofty ; 
neither do I exercise myself in great matters, or in things 
too high for me. 

"Lord, I have not ambitiously sought the throne of Israel " — 
have not thrust myself forward into high positions uncalled of 

thee. The verb translated "exercise myself" means walked as 

applied to the course of one's life. I have not pushed myself 
into great matters — made myself conversant with them. 

2. Surely I have behaved and quieted myself, as a child 
that is weaned of his mother : my soul is even as a weaned 
child. 

The verbs translated, "behaved," "quieted myself," suggest 
rather this sense : I have leveled down [toned down] and silenced 
my soul ; I have suppressed and kept down undue aspirations, as a 
weaned child keeps down and crucifies his natural cravings and 
makes himself quiet without the long enjoyed indulgence. David 



512 



PSALM CXXXII. 



would imply that his soul was only human ; had by nature aspira- 
tions in plenty, but had subdued them under the fear and love of 
God. 

3. Let Israel hope in the Lord from henceforth and for- 
ever. 

"O Israel, hope thou in the Lord evermore" — it being implied 
that such hope and trust stand opposed to the proud aspirations 
just above referred to, and consist only with the sincere humility 
which the Psalm illustrates and commends. 

PSALM CXXXII. 

This Psalm is built upon two great events in the life of David, 
viz., his bringing the ark from its exile up to the hill of Zion (2 Sam. 
6), and the promise made to him of a kingdom in the line of his 
family, made perpetual through the Messiah, as recorded in 2 Sam. 
7. Upon the basis of these great events and the promises of God 
imbedded in them, the restored exiles rested their whole move- 
ment — their hopes in God and their endeavors to re-establish the 
institutions of their fathers. Hence those events of David's history 
were naturally full of religious inspiration, and were pertinently 
wrought into this sacred song, in all points appropriate to the 
times of the restoration. 

1. Lord, remember David, and all his afflictions: 

2. How he sware unto the Lord, and vowed unto the 
mighty God of Jacob ; 

3. Surely I will not come into the tabernacle of my house, 
nor go up into my bed ; 

4. I will not give sleep to mine eyes, or slumber to mine 
eyelids 

' 5. Until I find out a place for the Lord, a habitation for 
the mighty God of Jacob. 

"Lord, remember as to David," i. e., in his behalf, as inuring 
to his benefit — all his trials, his heart-burdens — which the Psalm- 
ist proceeds to specify in certain particulars. Remember how 
solemnly and earnestly he set his heart on recovering the ark, on 
providing a suitable habitation for it upon Mt. Zion, and locating 

it there. The word for "surely" (v. 3) is the customary form 

of the solemn oath: u If I shall go into the tent of my house," 
etc., this "if" being intensely emphatic, equivalent to saying: 
" If 1 do, then let my name perish! " So deeply in earnest was 
David in this enterprise. 

6. Lo, we heard of it at Ephratah : we found it in the 
fields of the wood. 



PSALM CXXX1I. 



513 



These may be taken as the words of David, speaking for him- 
self and his associates. We heard of the ark first while we were 
at Ephratah — "the same is Bethlehem" (Gen. 48: 7). That is, 
this being David's native city, he heard of the ark first while 
yet a mere youth in his paternal home. Ultimately he found it 
at Kirjath-Jearim, the forest city [precisely, the city of forest 
trees]. The history confirms this point. See 1 Chron. 13 : 5, 6. 

7. We will go into his tabernacles : we will worship at 
his footstool. 

8. Arise, O Lord, into thy rest ; thou, and the ark of 
thy strength. 

9. Let thy priests be clothed with righteousness ; and let 
thy saints shout for joy. 

By a sudden transition the ark is supposed to be brought to 
its destined home and all is ready for worship. Pertinent noAv 
is the solemn public prayer that God himself would arise and 
come into this place of his abiding rest — the seat of his visible 



lid of the ark of the covenant and underneath the cherubim. 
The words of this prayer are those used by Solomon at the dedi- 
cation of the first temple when he came precisely to this point — ■ 
the consecration of the ark and the prayerful invocation of God's 
presence to abide there (2 Chron. 6: 41); " Now, therefore, arise, 
O Lord God, into thy resting place, thou and the ark of thy 
strength ; let thy priests, 0 Lord God, be clothed with salvation, 
and let thy saints rejoice in goodness." 

10. For thy servant David's sake turn not away the face 
of thine anointed. 

The usage of the phrase : " Turn not away the face," appears 
fully in the original in 1 King 2 : 16, 17, 20 — "reject not my pe- 
tition." Exegetically, the great question of the verse is : What 

is meant by " thine anointed? " Is it David himself; or some defi- 
nite king among his merely human descendants ; or does it apply 
to each or any of them as they come into office to bear the re- 
sponsibilities of this line of anointed kings? I incline to the 
latter construction, under which the petition is applicable to any 
one or to all the anointed successors of David. For David's sake 
let every one of them be admitted to free audience before thee 
and his prayer be evermore availing. The context contemplates 
a long line of kings descended from David. It was pertinent to 
make them all the subjects of this prayer. 

11. The Lord hath sworn in truth unto David ; he will 
not turn from it ; Of the fruit of thy body Avill I set upon 
thy throne. 

12. If thy children will keep my covenant and my testi- 



presence 




above the mercy-seat, upon the 



5U 



PSALM CXXXII. 



mony that I shah teach them, their children shall also sit 
upon thy throne for evermore. 

The points made in these verses may be seen in 2 Sam. 7, and 
1 Kings 8: 25, 26. and 1 Chron. 17, and Ps. 89: 19-37, etc. 

13. For the Lord hath chosen Zion : he hath desired it 
for his habitation. 

14. This is my rest forever : here will I dwell ; for I have 
desired it. 

15. I will abundantly bless her provision : I will satisfy 
her poor with bread. 

16. I will also clothe her priests with salvation : and her 
saints shall shout aloud for joy. 

All these points have a precious bearing on the hearts of the re- 
stored exiles. Upon the basis of these ancient promises they 
were then building with immense labor another temple in which 
they pray that God may dwell with his manifested presence, ful- 
filling his great promises as made specially to David. The pro- 

visons — the bread (v. 15) — should doubtless be understood as spirit- 
ual, not material; the bread of eternal life, and not merely the 
" bread that perisheth." 

17. There will I make the horn of David to bud : I 
have ordained a lamp for mine anointed. 

18. His enemies will I clothe with shame : but upon 
himself shall his crown flourish. 

The "horn," a common symbol of power, is here coupled with 
the idea of vegetable growth, to "bud" — but the Hebrew word 
suggests springing up as the grass. The ultimate reference may 
be to David's greater Son, in whom all these magnificent promises 
to David and his seed culminate. So understood, the allusion to 
this passage by Zacharias (Luke 1 : 69) tallies well with the state- 
ment that " he was filled with the Holy Ghost and prophesied, 
"The Lord hath raised up an horn of salvation for us in the house 

of his servant David." " I have arranged" [put in order] "a 

lamp for mine anointed," referring to the lamps kept in order by 
the priests in the temple. This usage seems to furnish the figure ; 
its significance comes from the relation between light and truth, 
so that this signifies the light of salvation which the Messiah sheds 

forth on a morally dark world. Glorious victory shall be his 

reward ; his enemies clothed with the shame of overthrow and de- 
feat; his own crown flourishing in perpetual beauty and glory. 
The figure here follows that in v. 17 — the horn shooting up as a 
vegetable growth ; so the crown puts forth blossoms and flowers 
of celestial beauty. 



PSALM OXXXTTT. 



515 



PSALM CXXXIII. 

This Psalm, ascribed to David, was admirably adapted to his 
times to encourage the great convocation on their religious festi- 
vals; and not less adapted to the age of the restoration when the 
same results were so exceedingly desirable. 

1. Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren 
to dwell together in unity ! 

By general consent of lexicographers and critics, the Hebrew 
words translated "together in unity," mean together in place, and 
leave unity in feeling and spirit to be inferred. The writer must 
be supposed to think of the great religious festivals which brought 
the masses of the people together for the delightful service of pub- 
lic religious worship. This service was grateful to such a heart 
as David's; it was morally and politically wholesome; it was so- 
cially delightful to the whole people, old and young ; it could 
scarcely fail to exert a precious religious influence upon all. The 
bringing of the whole people together in one place during these 
great festivals served to bring their hearts together in fraternal 
union. 

2. It is like the precious ointment upon the head, that 
ran clown upon the beard, even Aaron's beard : that went 
down to the skirts of his garments; 

The influence of such a convocation was fragrant like the odors 
of precious ointment, that which was poured on Aaron's head 
being specified for the two-fold reason of its superior richness, 
and* of its most sacred associations. The composition of this 
anointing oil may be seen in Ex. 30 : 23-25. 

3. As the dew of Hermon, and as the dew that descended 
upon the mountains of Zion : for there the Lokd com- 
manded the blessing, even life for evermore. 

Of the two figures which set forth the delightfulness of the great 
religious convocations of Israel, the anointing oil is the work of 
human hands ; the dew, of divine. The grateful refreshing dews 
drop down from God. In climates where rains are restricted to 
certain seasons and heavy dews supply in a measure their absence, 

it is not easy to over-estimate their value. On this verse some 

critics raise the question how the dews of Hermon, far away on 
the north-eastern boundary of Palestine, could fall on the moun- 
tains of Zion. I doubt if the poet-author had any difficulty in his 
mind on this point. He seems to have thought of Mfc Hermon as 
distinguished for its copious dews of material sort, but of Mt 
Zion as similarly distinguished for dews of spiritual sort — dews of 
heavenly grace, even God's own best blessings — life eternal. 



516 



PSALMS CXXXIV— CXXXV. 



PSALM CXXXIV. 

1. Behold, bless ye the Lord, all ye servants of the Lord, 
which by night stand in the house of the Lord. 

2. Lift up your hands in the sanctuary, and bless the 
Lord. 

3. The Lord that made heaven and earth bless thee out 
of Zion. 

This last of the "songs of the ascents" supposes the people to 
have reached the temple and to call on the priests in attendance 

there to bless Jehovah in devout adoration. The question may 

arise whether the priests stood throughout the whole night in the tem- 
ple. These very words and in this form occur Ps. 92 : 2 : " To 
show forth thy loving-kindness in the morning, and thy faithful- 
ness in the nights? With scarcely a doubt this refers to the 
morning and evening sacrifices.— - — "Lift up your hands in the 
sanctuary," should be toward the sanctuary, the most holy place — 

this being the customary attitude of prayer and worship. In 

the last verse, the priests respond with their benediction-^" The 
Lord who made heaven and earth bless thee out of Zion " — the 
place of his holy habitation ; " thee " applying to every humble 
worshiper. Thus people and priests call upon each other to ren- 
der worship and praise to their common Lord and Father. 'His- 
torically stated, we may see something similar — perhaps the very 

same — in Neh. 9 : 5, and onward. "We may hope that these 

songs of the ascents were verily sung " with the spirit and with the 
understanding also," quickening the hearts of all the worshipers 
on those impressive, hallowed days of their holy convocation. 

PSALM CXXXV. 

The songs of the ascents are closed, but their spirit lingers still. 
Indeed we may suppose the people to have now rested from their 
journeyings, planting their weary feet and pitching their tents in 
the sacred city, prepared for the delightful scenes of worship, so 
long and joyously anticipated. What now but songs of praise ? 
The various classes — priests, Levites, people, call upon each other 
and call on themselves to lift up heart and voice in reverent praise 
to their own Jehovah. This Psalm involves no exegetical diffi- 
culties. All is plain. Most of the phrases have occurred already. 

1. Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the name of the 
Lord ; praise him, O ye servants of the Lord. 

2. Ye that stand in the house of the Lord, in the courts 
of the house of our God. 



PSALM CXXXV. 



517 



3. Praise the Lord ; for the Lord is good : sing praises 
unto his name ; for it is pleasant. 

4. For the Lord hath chosen Jacob unto himself, and 
Israel for his peculiar treasure. 

"His peculiar treasure," to appropriate them specially to him- 
self, having henceforth a personal right of property in them as in 
no other nation. The rather unusual words for " peculiar treas- 
ure " occur in the same sense, Ex. 19 : 5, and Deut. 7: 6, and 14 : 
2, and 26: 18. 

5. For I know that the Lord is great, and that our Lord 
is above all gods. 

6. Whatsoever the Lord pleased, that did he in heaven, 
and in earth, in the seas, and all deep places. 

7. He causeth the vapors to ascend from the ends of the 
earth ; he maketh lightnings f6r the rain ; he bringeth the 
wind out of his treasuries. 

"For / know" — the word "I" being made emphatic in the 
original. Whatever may be the case with others, I have had per- 
sonal and precious experience of the greatness of Jehovah's power, 
and of his infinite supremacy above all other gods. The author of 
the Psalm may either speak for all Israel as a unit, or he may 
have framed his song so that every worshiper might say this for 

himself as his own testimony. This supreme Lord has done his 

pleasure every-where— a truth which may be seen more clearly by 
looking at some of its particular manifestations — e. g., in heaven, 
earth, sea, etc. "He maketh lightnings for the rain" to accom- 
pany it and add sublimity and majesty to the tempest and the 
storm. " He bringeth the wind out of his treasuries " according to 
the favorite poetic conception of those times — that the Lord im- 
prisons his winds in store-houses, to call them forth when he will 

for his work. See Job 38: 22. The phrases in v. 7 appear in 

Jer. 10: 13, and 51: 16. 

8. Who smote the first-born of Egypt, both of man and 
beast. 

9. Who sent tokens and wonders into the midst of thee, 
O Egypt, upon Pharaoh, and upon all his servants. 

10. Who smote great nations, and slew mighty kings ; 

11. Sihon king of the Amorites, and Og king of Bashan, 
and all the kingdoms of Canaan : 

12. And gave their land for a heritage, a heritage unto 
Israel his people. 

Gave their lands for an inheritance to Israel, to be held by them 
through their successive generations. This was in fulfillment of 
long standing promise to the patriarchs. 



518 



PSALM CXXXV. 



13. Thy name, O Lord, endureth forever; and thy 
memorial, O Lord, throughout all generations. 

14= For the Lord will judge his people, and he will 
repent himself concerning his servants. 

The memorial name of Israel's God is Jehovah, -with reference 
to its significance — fidelity to promise, faithfulness resting on im- 
mutability. See Ex. 3: 15. and Hos. 12: 5. It had pleased God 
to give them this name of himself with this interpretation ; -with, 
joy therefore, the Psalmist declares that this name shall stand 
good through all generations — the ground of abiding, everlasting 

confidence in the Lord of Hosts as by covenant their own God. - 

Will judge his people " — in discipline and even chastisement for 
their national sins, as in their then recent captivity; but he will 
also repent himself in behalf of his servants when they turn peni- 
tentlv to seek his face. See this truth drawn out beautifully in 
Jer. 31 : 16-21. 

15. The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, the 
work of men's hands. 

16. They have mouths, but they speak not ; eyes have 
they, but they see not ; 

17. They have ears, but they hear not ; neither is there 
any breath in their mouths. 

18. They that make them are like unto them : so is every 
one that trusteth in them. 

Our God is utterly unlike and infinitely above all the idols of the 
heathen, as you will see by a moment's consideration upon what 

they are. Nearly the same words occur Ps. 115: 4-8. In v. IS 

the original must mean, not " are like them " i. e., in character, 
but shall be like them, i e., in destiny — sure to be destroyed — 
brought utterly to nought. 

19. Bless the Lord, O house of Israel : bless the Lord, 
O house of Aaron : 

20. Bless the Lord, O house of Levi : ye that fear the 
Lord, bless the Lord. 

21. Blessed be the Lord out of Zion, which dwelleth at 
Jerusalem. Praise ye the Lord. 

Let blessings in the sense of offered praises go forth out of Zion 
to Jehovah who dwelleth in Jerusalem. Let all the people who 
constitute his Zion pour forth their ceaseless praises to their 
Almighty Lord who dwells in the midst of them. 



PSALM CXXXVI. 



519 



PSALM CXXXVI. 

This Psalm bears the closest relation to Ps. 135 — identically the 
same in its general purpose, viz., praise to God for his goodness 
and mercy: and similar in many of its specifications. It is pecu- 
liar only in its structure, each several clause being followed by 
what may be called "a refrain" — "for his mercy endureth for- 
ever." This seems to have been sung as a chorus, perhaps in 
response with the other clauses. Historically it may have been 
composed to be sung on occasion of laying the foundation stone 
of the temple upon which occasion Ezra (3: 11) informs us, 
" They sang together by course in praising and giving thanks unto 
the Lord because he is good, for his mercy endureth forever toward 
Israel. And all the people shouted with a great shout. when they 
praised the Lord because the foundation of the house of the Lord 
was laid." 

1. O give thanks unto the Lokd ; for he is good : for his 
mercy endureth forever. 

. 2. O give thanks unto the God of gods : for his mercy 
endureth forever. 

- 3. O give thanks to the Lord of lords : for his mercy 
endureth forever. 

"For he is good" is the one comprehensive ground or reason 

for praise, including in itself all the particulars. The God of 

gods — not the God of all the false gods ; but a superlative phrase 
meaning simply the Supreme God, as in Deut. 19 : 7, whence both 
these phrases — "God of gods" and "Lord of lords" — seem to 
have been taken. 

4. To him who alone doeth great wonders : for his mercy 
endureth forever. 

"Who alone doeth," etc., which means more than doing them 
without aid. by his own single arm. The higher idea is — He and 
he only, to the exclusion of all others ; he and none but he, doeth 
these incomparable miracles of power. This latter sense prac- 
tically includes the former. 

5. To him that by wisdom made the heavens : for his 
mercy endureth forever. 

6. To him that stretched out the earth above the waters : 
for his mercy endureth forever. 

" Spread out the earth above the waters," i. e., higher than they. 
See Ps. 24 : 2, and notes there. 

7. To him that made great lights : for his mercy endureth 
forever : 



520 PSALM CXXXVI. 

8. The sun to rule by day : for his mercy endureth for- 
ever: 

9. The moon and stars to rule by night: for his mercy 
endureth forever. 

t This ruling of the day and the night follows the record in 
Gen. 1. 

10. To him that smote Egypt in their first-born : for his 
mercy endureth forever : 

Remarkably the same mercy smote Egypt's first-born -which 
saved all Israel — the former being a necessary part of the same 
merciful work. 

11. And brought out Israel from among them : for his 
mercy endureth forever: 

12. With a strong hand, and with a stretched out arm : 
for his mercy endureth forever : 

13. To him which divided the Red Sea iuto parts : for 
his mercy endureth forever : 

14. And made Israel to pass through the midst of it : 
for his mercy endureth forever : 

15. But overthrew Pharaoh and his host in the Red Sea : 
for his mercy endureth forever. 

According to vs. 13, 14, the Lord having divided the Red Sea 
into parts, made Israel pass between the parts, i. e., between the 
waters on one side and the waters on the other. 

16. To him which led his people through the wilderness : 
for his mercy endureth forever. 

17. To him which smote great kings : for his mercy en- 
dureth forever : 

18. And slew famous kings : for his mercy endureth for- 
ever : 

19. Sihon king of the Amorites : for his mercy endureth 
forever : 

20. And Og the king of Bash an : for his mercy endureth 
forever : 

21. And gave their land for a heritage : for his mercy en- 
dureth forever : 

22. Even a heritage unto Israel his servant : for his mercy 
endureth forever. 

Here again mercy shines in the judgments sent on opposiDg 
kings. 

23. Who remembered us in our low estate : for his mercy 
endureth forever : 



PSALM CXXXVII. 



521 



24. And hath redeemed us from our enemies : for his 
mercy endureth forever. 

The fact that the people had but just come forth from their po- 
litical bondage in Babylon suggests that as the low estate hero 
thought of. So we might infer from Ps. 107 : 16. 

25. Who giveth food to all flesh : for his mercy endureth 
forever. 

26. O give thanks unto the God of heaven : for his mercy 
endureth forever. 

God, the universal Provider. See Ps. 104: 27. Surely we may 
trust him to provide for all our wants and much more if we are his 

obedient, trustful people. " God of'heaven " — a phrase not in 

common use until the age of the restoration — occurs eight times 
in the book of Ezra, twice in Nehemiah, three times in Daniel. 

PSALM CXXXVII. 

This exquisitely touching, plaintive song, admired as such in all 
ages, was written by some unknown pen, either in Babylon or soon 
after the restoration while the scenes of the captivity were still 
fresh. It is admirably adapted to its place in this collection among 
Psalms of the restoration, impressively suggesting : We have abun- 
dant reason for thanksgiving and praise from overflowing hearts ; 
for, think of the long years of our sadness, and silence, and tears 
by the rivers of Babylon— our harps on the willows ; no songs of 
our dear Zion on our tongues : but how changed the scene now ! 
Such a song of reminiscences could not fail to deepen the tide of 
grateful praise for their present mercies. 

1. By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we 
wept, when we remembered Zion. 

2. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst 
thereof. 

"Babylon" — perhaps for Babylonia, i. e., not the city alone but 
the country politically connected. Then the "rivers" [plural] 
might include the Euphrates, Tigris, Chaboras (Ezek. 1 : 1, 3) and 
Ulai (Dan. 8 : 2). But the Euphrates itself was not restricted to 
a single channel, for one of the great works of Nebuchadnezzar 
was the construction of an. immense reservoir — an artificial lake, 
into which by canals he conducted the waters of the Euphrates at 
flood, probably for the double purpose of abating the danger to 
the low lands from its spring freshets, and of storing waters for 
irrigation in the dry season. Upon these immense works it is 
more than supposable that the captive Jews were employed, as 
their fathers were in Egypt on public works of national interest. 



522 



PSALM CXXXVII. 



The location of the scenes of this song beside these river 
channels — the scenes of their daily toil — would then be spe- 
cially suggestive. " There we sat down;" but what is the special 

significance of this sitting? Is it simply living as the place of 
residence, or resting as laborers sit down when over much weary, 
or mourning as the orientals sit on the ground or in ashes under 
the weight of crushing sorrow ? If the word " sat " has any 
special significance it is probably the latter. See cases of this 

usage, Isa. 3: 26, and Lam. 2: 10, and Job 2: 13. Not only 

sat [on the ground] but wept — wept, not particularly as they re- 
membered the homes of their fathers in the goodly land of prom- 
ise, or the plenty or the freedom enjoyed there, but as they 
remembered Zion, the hallowed temple, the holy city, the place 
and the scenes of sacred worship, the recognized home of Israel's 
God, sitting beneath the cherubim. The fresh remembrance of 
Zion and of all these surroundings of hers brought from our eyes 

bitter tears. There, alas I we had no more occasion for our 

harps of song; so we hung them on the willows along the river's 
bank. 

3. For there they that carried us away captive required 
of us a song ; and they that wasted us required of us mirth, 
saying. Sing us one of the songs of Zion. 

Somewhat more literally thus: "For there our captors de- 
manded of us words of song, and our robbers, mirth [or joy] — 

"Sing to us out of a song of Zion." Did this demand come of 

curiosity or of a spirit of insult ? Possibly only the former ; 
more probably, the latter. That those who made the demand are 
spoken of as having captured and plundered them implies that 
this demand was made in somewhat the same spirit. It is at least 
obvious that they failed to appreciate the sadness of heart under 
which these captives were weeping. Perhaps their spirit was not 
unlike that of American slaveholders (that were) who were never 
pleased to see a slave in tears, but would fain call or tempt him to 

mirth instead. Incidentally the case witnesses to the musical 

culture of the Hebrews as at least in advance of their age. 

4. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange 
land? 

5. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand for- 
get her cunning. 

6. If I do not remember thee, let my tongue cleave to 
the roof of my mouth ; if I prefer not Jerusalem above my 
chief joy. 

Why could they not sing ? In most touching words they answer : 
"How shall we sing the songs of our Jehovah in a strange land?" 
Every strain would seem in its echo to mock our grief, telling us 
that he is our faithful God no longer ! Ah, can we forget Jerusa- 
lem ! To sing in tones of mirth as they demand would imply it; 



PSALM CXXXVII. 



523 



but when I do, let my right hand lose its skill on the harp ; let 
my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth and no voice remain 

for song ! " If I exalt not Jerusalem above the head of my 

joy " — fairly represents the last clause of v. 6. How could they 
be mirthful when their most beloved Jerusalem lay in utter deso- 
lation ! 

7. Remember, O Lord, the children of Edom in the day 
of Jerusalem ; who said, Rase it, rase it, even to the foun- 
dation thereof. 

The tone of vs. 7-9 shows plainly that the Hebrew captives felt 
this demand upon them for a song of Zion to be a cruel taunt, 
one of the bitter aggravations of their lot. The " day of Jerusa- 
lem" was that memorable one when the walls fell, and her enemies 
rushed in to sack, burn, and destroy. Then the children of Edom, 
their national cousins, were specially spiteful, revengeful. Wisely, 
prudentially, they had a common interest with Judah in repelling 
this Chaldean invasion and in driving this conquering horde back 
from Western Asia to their home on the Euphrates; but their old 
antipathy against the Hebrew race blazed forth- — an outrage on 
humanity and a rank offense against the God of heaven ! As 
said here, they shouted, Raze, raze the city to its very founda- 
tions ; leave not one stone upon another ! The prophet Obadiah 
(vs. 10-15) charges upon them that they stood on the enemy's 
side ; looked on joyfully, and spake proudly in the day of their 
distress ; joined in the pillage ; intercepted the fugitives and 
turned them back upon the sword of the conquerors. Amos (1 : 
11) gave the reasons for the ruin of Edom, saying: "Because 
he did pursue his brother with the sword, and did cast off all 
pity, and his anger did tear perpetually, and he kept his wrath for- 
ever." Was there not a natural fitness in the prayer that God 
would "remember these children of Edom?" 

8. O daughter of Babylon, who art to be destroyed ; 
happy shall he be, that rewardeth thee as thou has served us. 

9. Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little 
ones against the stones. 

These words will suggest even to candid minds the query 
whether they are not open to the charge of cruel vindictiveness ? 
In answer to this question it has been said: These words were 
simply reported by the Psalmist as having been wrung from the 
lips and souls of the crushed captives, but not indorsed as right. 
But this leaves the question still unanswered — Why then do they 
stand in a song for the Hebrew sanctuary with no exception taken 
to their spirit? Would there not be danger lest their spirit, sup- 
posing it to be wrong, would be contagious and morally bad ? 

A deeper view of the case will suggest that this idea of retribution, 
even in its most specific form, was not original with these captives. 
They must have known the " burden on Babylon" as given by Isaiah 



524 



PSALM CXXXVIII. 



(13 : 16, 18). "The children shall be dashed in pieces before their 
eyes ; they shall have no pity on the fruit of the womb ; their eye 
shall not spare children." Also the words of Jeremiah, sent 
expressly to them during their captivity: "Take vengeance upon 
her; as she hath done, do unto her. Recompense her according 
to her works ; according to all that she hath done, do unto her " 
( Jer. 50 : 15, 29). Remarkably the Targum represents these words 
of our Psalm as uttered by the archangels Michael and Gabriel. 
Wordsworth remarks that " this view of them has its value as show- 
ing that in the opinion of the Hebrew church these expressions 
were not regarded as coming from the mouth of men speaking their 
own feelings, but as derived from a higher source. This is the 
true view of them. They are the words of the people of God ac- 
cepting and re-echoing the judicial decrees revealed in his word." 

It seems to me that no just opinion of their moral character 

can be formed without taking into account the prophecies on the 
subject, a part only of which are cited above, and which must 
have taught them unmistakably God's purpose of retribution upon 
both Babylon and Edom, and, in fact, which must have suggested 
to them the very ideas which seem to our view most exceptionable — 
the dashing of their infants upon the rocks. The question in its 
♦ moral aspects amounts therefore to this : Is it, or is it not, morally 
right for God's people to accept his purposes of retribution upon 
their enemies when those purposes are definitely revealed ? Can 
they with moral uprightness say, " Even so, Father, for so it has 
seemed good in thy sight?" 

PSALM CXXXVIII. 

With this Psalm commences a series of eight (138-145) ascribed 
to David, yet some of them bear the marks of having been slightly 
modified in diction to harmonize with the dialect of the age of the 
restoration. Their general tone is that of prayer and of praise, 
filling therefore an exceedingly useful place in this new collection 

of songs for the sanctuary compiled in this revival age. Upon 

the Psalm before us a new light is shed by reading it in connec- 
tion with 2 Sam. 7, and 1 Chron. 17 — that great event of David's 
religious life, in which his soul was moved to build an house for 
the Lord, and the prayer of his heart was answered by God's prom- 
ise to build him an house — in the sense of an eternal succession 
upon the throne of Israel, and the great Messiah to crown all. 

1. I will praise thee with my whole heart : before the gods 
will I sing praise unto thee. 

" With my whole heart " is entirely in the spirit of David, devel- 
oping one of the prime excellences of his character — a soul full 
of love and gratitude to God, the true spirit of worship. " Before 



PSALM CXXXVIII. 



525 



the gods " — in the face of the heathen gods of all the world, 
squarely against the whole drift of an idolatrous age, as if he would 
fain make his example a solid protest against the usages and pub- 
lic sentiment of every other nation under heaven. 

2. I will worship toward thy holy temple, and praise thy 
name for thy loving-kindness and for thy truth: for thou 
hast magnified thy word above all thy name. 

" For thou hast magnified thy word" (of promise), i. e., as given 
2 Sam. 7, above all prior manifestations of thy name. He means 
to say that this great promise was a step in advance upon all that 
had gone before. So it truly was. It was growth and expansion 
in the volume of prophetic foreshowings as to the Messiah. It 
located him in the line of David ; it made David's reign a symbol 
of his. Hence David's heart was moved to special worship and 
praise for this loving-kindness of his God and for that truth of God 
in which he knew so well that he might fearlessly repose for the 
complete fulfillment of every good word he had spoken. 

3. In the day when I cried thou answeredst me, and 
strengthenedst me with strength in my soul. 

The Hebrew verb for " strengthenedst" seems to have the sense — 
to make me courageous, brave.; to raise my hopes with the assur- 
ance of great success in my life-work for the God of Israel. Gese- 
nius says — "to make fierce, courageous; to embolden." Fuerst : 
" Thou excite st me strongly in my soul." 

4. All the kings of the earth shall praise thee, O Lord, 
when they hear the words of thy mouth. 

5. Yea, they shall sing in the ways of the Lord : for 
great is the glory of the Lord. 

This wa3 prophetic vision, foreseeing that the Great Messiah 
would become the joy of all earthly kings ; the theme of their 
praises. Isaiah is full of this sentiment. We find it in Ps. 68 : 
29, 31, and 102: 15. 

6. Though the Lord be high, yet hath he respect unto 
the lowly : but the proud he knoweth afar off. 

Though the Lord Jehovah be "the High and Lofty One who 
inhabiteth eternity, dwelling in the high and holy place," yet he is 
not too high to see the lowly ones of earth, those of a " humble and 
contrite spirit." "The proud he knoweth" — but not as being in 
the moral sense near. He is not near them as their Friend. 

7. Though I walk in the midst of trouble, thou wilt revive 
me : thou shalt stretch forth thine hand against the wrath 
of mine enemies, and thy right hand shall save me. 

8. The Lord will perfect that which concerneth me : thy 

23 



526 



PSALM CXXXIX. 



mercy, O Lord, endureth forever : forsake not the works of 
thine own hands. 

This great work which the Lord has begun in my behalf, he "will 
surely finish, for his mercy will be as great through all coming 
ages as now, I may therefore fitly pray him never to desist from 
this work of his hands — never to let his hand be slack [the sense 
of the Hebrew] in its execution. 

PSALM CXXXIX. 

This remarkable Psalm has been justly admired in all ages for 
its view of the spiritual nature and perfections of God, especially 
of his omniscience and omniprescence. Noticeably, these are 
thought of and presented here, not in their abstract nature and 
relations, but in their personal relations and bearings upon " me," 
the writer, and myself — each singer and reader of this Psalm. 
The God of David, the God of the ancient Hebrew worship, was 
no mere abstraction, no impersonal universality, to be thought of 
only as infinitely distant and infinitely regardless of man or of 
man's moral life and real welfare. The Psalm before us is a 

lesson on these points. Though ascribed to David, its style, 

choice of words and the peculiar sense sometimes given them are 
thought to indicate strongly the age of the restoration. The basis 
of the Psalm being David's, it may have been modified in these 
respects by those who in the age of Ezra revised it for greater 
practical usefulness. That this was the traditional opinion of 
learned Jews is indicated by the remark in the Septuagint cap- 
tion: "A Psalm of David by Haggai and Zechariah." 

1. O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. 

2. Thou knowest my down-sitting and mine uprising ; 
thou understandest my thought afar off. 

3. Thou compassest my path and my lying down, and art 
acquainted with all my ways. 

"Thou knowest my down-sitting and my uprising" — cognizant 

of all my daily life. " Thou understandest my thought" — in the 

moral sense of the word — my will, purpose — thou knowest from 
afar. Since God must be thought of as far off as truly as near, 
it is pertinent to consider that even from the most distant point 

conceivable, he still knoweth my most secret thought. To this 

correspond the words of Eliphaz (Job 22: 12-14): "Is not God 
in the height of heaven ? And behold the height of the stars how 
high they are ! And thou sayest, How doth God know ? Can he 
judge through the dark cloud ? Thick clouds are a covering to 
him that he seeth not, and he walketh through the circuit of 
heaven." Pertinent here are the words of the Lord through Jere 



PSALM CXXXIX. 



527 



raiah also (Jer. 23: 23, 24): "Am I a God at hand, saith the 
Lord, and not a God afar off? Can any hide himself in secret 
places that I shall not see him ? Do not I fill heaven and earth ? 

saith the Lord." Thou compasseth my path" — but the sense of 

this verb, best sustained by usage, is to winnow, sift, and so to dis- 
close and search out perfectly. Some critics, however, give the 
word the sense, to encircle, hedge about, in the sense of guarding. 

"Art acquainted," as by most familiar intercourse, as if thou 

hadst always lived with me [Hebrew] and thus become entirely 
familiar with my ways. 

4. For there is not a word in my tongue, but, lo, O Lord, 
thou knowest it altogether. 

5. Thou hast beset rue behind and before, and laid thine 
hand upon me. 

6. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me ; it is high, I 
can not attain unto it. 

"Not a word but lo ;" behold; look at this wonderful fact, that 

God knows perfectly every word that passes my tongue ! " Hast 

beset me" — not in the bad sense of waylaying, but of being close 
about me, so very near, behind and before, even thy hand is laid 

upon me. " Such knowledge as this is too wonderful for me to 

comprehend " — too high for me to reach, grasp and measure. It 
surpasses all my notions of knowledge as obtained among men. 

7. Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall 
I flee from thy presence? 

8. If I ascend up into heaven, thou art there: if I make 
my bed in hell, behold, thou art there. 

9. if I take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the 
uttermost parts of the sea ; 

10. . Even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy right 
hand shall hold me. 

Passing now from God's all perfect knowledge to his universal 
presence, he would fain represent this by supposing all imaginable 
ways of escape from it. " If I were to mount up to heaven, thou 

are there; or make Sheol my bed, thou art there." [If I say] 

" I will take the wings of dawn ; let me dwell in the farthest sea ; 
even there thy hand would lead me ; thy right hand would hold 
me fast." 

11. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me: even 
the night shall be light about me. 

12. Yea, the darkness hideth not from thee; but the 
night shineth as the day: the darkness and the night are 
both alike to thee. 

Literally, "And then I say, Surely darkness will shield me, but 
night becomes light about me. Yea, darkness will not make it 



528 



PSALM CXXXIX. 



dark as to thee; and night will shine as the day; as the dark- 
ness, as the light" — this last clause being a special Hebrew idiom 
meaning that one is just like the other; it makes no difference 
which ; all is the same with God. 

13. For thou hast possessed my reins : thou hast covered 
me in my mother's womb. 

14. I will praise thee ; for I am fearfully and wonder- 
fully made : marvelous are thy works ; and that my soul 
knoweth right well. 

"My reins" — my most secret parts. Thou hadst perfect con- 
trol of my whole being; it was in thine hand and under thine 
eye from my very conception in the womb. This view of the case 
calls forth praise to the Great Father. I will praise thee, for I 
am fearfully distinguished" [i. e., from other beings of lower 
order] ; u marvelous are thy works ; my soul knoweth this much " — 
very thoroughly; my experience, my knowledge of myself and of 
my relations to my Maker impress these truths upon me. 

15. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was 
made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts 
of the earth. 

16. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet beiDg imper- 
fect; and in thy book all my members were written, ivhich 
in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of 
them. 

A free translation with explanations attached will best present 
my views of these difficult verses. "My body" [Hebrew, bones] 
"was not concealed from thee when I was formed in secret, 
curiously wrought [like embroidered work] in the womb" — often 
compared for its secrecy to the depths of the earth. u My shape- 
less, unformed mass [the foetus] thine eyes did see, and in thy 
book [of divine memory] were all of them written, even all my 
future days were shaped before even one of them yet was." That 
is, God knew me yet unborn and shaped all my future life from 
that ante-birth period. The original has no word for " members." 
The word really given is " days," in the sense of his future his- 
toric days — the after-life he was to live. 

17. How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! 
how great is the sum of them ! 

18. If I should count them, they are more in number 
than the sand : when I awake, I am still with thee. 

"Thy thoughts, O God" — not meaning my thoughts of thee but 
thy thoughts of me. How precious to me to realize all thy thoughts 
concerning me ; to think how many they are ; how far back in my 
personal existence they commenced; how constant and active they 
have been ever since ; how they have shaped my activities and 



PSALM CXXXIX. 



529 



determined all my destiny ! How Tain if I were to attempt to 
count them ! While I sleep, thou watchest evermore about me ; 

when I awake, still thou art near; I am with thee. Some critics 

give the verb translated "precious" the sense difficult of comprehen- 
sion, inscrutable ; taking their authority from late Chaldean usage. 
The Hebrew meaning — " precious" — seems to me more in the spirit 
of the Psalni and of the immediate context. 

19. Surely thou w T ilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from 
me therefore, ye bloody men. 

20. For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine ene- 
mies take thy name in vain. 

We must find the connection of this thought with what precedes in 
the Psalmist's purpose to make a practical application of these views 
of God's ever present hand and ever active care and love. His mind 
labors on the question of his moral relations to God's enemies. How 

would God have me think of them and feel toward them ? V. 19 

commences [literally] " If thou, O God, wilt slay the wicked " — then 
I stand aloof from them ; I bid them away from me ; for I can have 
no sympathy with men too wicked to be suffered by thee to live. 

Then v. 20 gives particulars in the grand indictment against 

them: "They speak against thee with malicious intent; they take 
thy name in vain — thine enemies ! " Real enemies to thee they are, 
as all their words and actions show. 

21. Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee? and 
am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee ? 

22. I hate them with perfect hatred : I count them mine 
enemies. 

Is not my heart with thee, 0 God in all its sympathies? I hate 
thy haters ; I utterly loathe, abhor, those who rise up in open hos- 
tility against thee. As they are thine enemies, so I count them 

mine. It does not seem to have entered for one moment into the 

Psalmist's theology that this spirit involves sinful vindictiveness. 
No doubt it seemed to him the most natural thing possible and 
the most righteous that his sympathies should flow in the same 
moral channel with God's ; that his heart should be perfectly at 
one with the heart and the interests of his benevolent Father. 

23. Search me, O God, and know my heart : try me, and 
know my thoughts : 

24. And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead 
me in the way everlasting. 

One closing supplication : Since thou, 0 God, knowest me so 
perfectly, I implore thee to keep thine' eye evermore upon me; 
reveal my heart truly to myself; see if there be any way of mis- 
chief, way of wrong, in me ; and lead me in the way of life eternal. 
Critics differ slightly as to the primary sense of the word trans- 



530 



PSALM CXL. 



lated "wicked," some supposing it to refer to idolatry; others, to 
pain. The connection suffices to show that it must refer to moral 

evil, sin. The "way everlasting" may refer primarily to the 

old way of holy men, patriarchs and saints of the olden time ; but 
the other view — the way that leads to endless life, seems to me 
more direct and pertinent. 

PSALM CXL. 

This Psalm ascribed to David takes up and expands the thought 
of Ps. 139 : 19-22 — which probably accounts for its place here in 
this compilation. The reader will notice its striking similarity to 
Ps. 52 and 54-59, in which David treats of his great dangers and 
trials and of his prayers to God, during his persecutions suffered 

from Saul. The good men of the times of Ezra and Nehemiah 

had no little occasion to sympathize with David since they too had 
sore trials from personal and national enemies — a fact which suffi- 
ciently accounts for their bringing this and kindred Psalms into 
this Book V of the Psalter. 

1. Deliver me, O Lord, from the evil man : preserve me 
from the violent man ; 

2. Which imagine mischiefs in their heart; continually 
are they gathered together for war. 

3. They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; 
adders' poison is under their lips. Selah. 

In the last clause of v. 2, " Continually are they gathered together 
for war," the critics differ slightly; e.g., "Gather wars together; 

multiplying them." " Excite, stir up wars ; " " Who dwell in 

dissensions quarrels;" "Gather for battle." The comparison 

of a slanderous tongue to a serpent is not uncommon in David's 
Psalms. 

4. Keep me, O Lord, from the hands of the wicked; 
preserve me from the violent man ; who have purposed to 
overthrow my goings. 

5. The proud have hid a snare for me, and cords ; they 
have spread a net by the way side ; they have set gins for 
me. Selah. 

" From the violent men who plot to thrust my feet from under 
me," contemplates the case of men who sought his life by violence. 
Snares to entrap him come by figure from the methods of taking 
wild animals. 

6. I said unto the Lord, Thou art my God : hear the 
voice of my supplications, O Lord. 



PSALM CXLT. 



531 



7. 0 God the Lord, the strength of my salvation, thou 
hast covered my head in the day of battle. 

8. Grant not, O Lord, the desires of the wicked : further 
not his wicked device ; lest they exalt themselves. Selah. 

Amid all these dangers, David looked upward to God for refuge 

to cover his head as a divine helmet in the day of battle. Note 

how the logic of faith and hope are wrought into the very form of 
this prayer: " Grant not, 0 Lord, the desires of the wicked." Cer- 
tainly God must have infinite reason for answering such a prayer 
favorably. His interests and sympathies are always against and 
never for granting the desires of wicked men. When the wicked 
pray to God according to their real heart, he can have no heart to 
grant their requests. They seek evil; God seeks good. 11 Fur- 
ther not his wicked devices: they will be elated.' '" This is all that 
David wrote in this clause ; but the logical connection is obvious, 
viz., If thou shouldesfc, they will be proud of it; will carry their 
head high ; will be overbearing and insolent, and perhaps he would 
imply also, will be all too strong for thy people to withstand. 

9. As for the head of those that compass me about, let 
the mischief of their own lips cover them. 

10. Let burning coals fall upon them: let them be cast 
into the fire ; into deep pits, that they rise not up again. 

11. Let not an evil speaker be established in the earth : 
evil shall hunt the violent man to overthrow him. 

In v. 10 "deep pits" may mean deep waters, or pits full of 

water. While David thanks the Lord for covering his head in 

the day of battle (v. 7), he prays that the heads of his enemies 
investing him round about, maybe covered with the very mischief 
they sought to bring slanderously upon him. This form of punish- 
ment puts their case in contrast with his. 

12. I know that the Lord will maintain the cause of the 
afflicted, and the right of the poor. 

13. Surely the righteous shall give thanks unto thy name : 
the upright shall dwell in thy presence. 

■ A precious confidence was this in David's heart, that the Lord 
would certainly maintain the cause of his own afliicted people — ■ 
the right, i. e. f the righteous cause of the poor. Every element in 
his moral nature conspires to place God's sympathies on the side 
of the oppressed, against their unrighteous oppressors. 

PSALM CXLI. 

Bearing the name of David as author, this Psalm corresponds 
in its general course of thought with the preceding one, presenting 



532 



PSALM CXLI. 



in their various phases his relations to his enemies on the one hand 
and to his God on the other. 

1. Lord, I cry unto thee : make haste unto me ; give ear 
unto my voice, when I cry unto thee. 

2. Let my prayer be set forth before thee as incense ; and 
the lifting up of my hands as the evening sacrifice. 

In the first clause of v. 2, the verb has normally the sense of 
being fixed, established, and consequently of being permanent. I 
take the sense here to be : Let my prayer ever be before thee as 
incense: let this be a fixed, invariable fact. " The evening sac- 
rifice " seem to have been pre-eminently the time for prayer and 
for the burning of incense, the fragrance of which was its "symbol. 
Note the case of Ezra (9 : 4, 5). 

3. Set a watch, O Lord, before my mouth; keep the 
door of my lips. 

4. Incline not my heart to any evil thing, to practice 
wicked works with men that work iniquity : and let me not 
eat of their dainties. 

" Incline not my heart to any evil thing," like the prayer, " Lead 
us not into temptation," must not be construed as assuming any 
danger or even moral possibility that God may tempt men to sin. 
It is rather a brief way of saying: Protect me by thy providence, 

guard me by thy Spirit, from being led into any evil thing. 

" Let me not cat the dainties of the wicked," in its moral appli- 
cation, covers not merely delicacies of food, tempting,- poisonous ; 
but all enticing seductions toward any sinful self-indulgence — 
temptation to any sin. 

5. Let the righteous smite me ; it shall be a kindness : 
and let him reprove me ; it shall be an excellent oil, which 
shall not break my head : for yet my prayer also shall be 
in their calamities. 

This verse is really difficult. The sentiment expressed in our 
English version is admirable ; but it is hard to make the Hebrew 
words yield it, and hard also to bring it into any logical relations 
to the context. I must prefer this construction: "Let the Kight- 
ous One [God] smite me mercifully and let him rebuke me : 
[such] oil of the head, my head shall not refuse ; for though re- 
peated, my prayer will be [unto him] under their inflictions " — 
i. e., under the inflictions of those wicked men whom God per- 
mits to afflict me for his ends of moral discipline. In the 

context [vs. 3, 4] David puts himself under God's care for his 
own moral culture. V. 5 gives us one of the points of this culture, 
viz., the discipline that comes from the wicked through God's 

wise permission for good moral results. As to the sense of 

particular words, "righteous" is said of one, not of many, and 



PSALM CXLI. • 533 

certainly may refer to God, the Righteous One. The word for 
" kindness " is the common one for God's mercy, and may well 
be used adverbially. The verb which the English version trans- 
lates, "shall not break," must have the sense refuse, as given 
above. In the, last clause, " their calamities" can not well mean 
the calamities of one righteous person, but "their" must refer to 
the wicked as in the phrase " their dainties " (v. 4). Instead of 
meaning calamities suffered, it should be calamities or evils in- 
flicted, i. e., by the wicked. The sentiment in the last clause is 

that a child of God may well afford to receive such moral disci- 
pline from God through the hand of wicked men because it is not 
only precious oil for the head [we should say, good for the heart] 
but it leaves to him the privilege and recourse of prayer. 

6. "When their judges are overthrown in stony places, 
they shall hear my words ; for they are sweet. 

"When their judges" [the leading men of my wicked op- 
pressors] "are hurled down- into the hand of the rocks, they will 
hear my words, for they are sweet." Hurled down upon the point 
of the rocks, which in figure are supposed to receive the falling 
into their uplifted hands. Casting men headlong down a preci- 
pice upon the rocks beneath was one form of punishment, some- 
times fatal, but not supposed to be altogether so in this case. 
The sense is — When judgments begin to fall heavily upon them, 
they will listen to my words (as they will not now), for they are 
really sweet, i. e., rich in wholesome truth. The word " sweet" 
looks back to their sweet " dainties " (v. 4) and quietly suggests 
that his wise words were really sweet, while their words" were "only 
treacherously, poisonously so. 

7. Our bones are scattered at the grave's mouth, as when 
one cutteth and cleaveth wood upon the earth. 

The translation of this verse should be improved, thus : " As one 
plows and cleaves furrows in the earth, our bones are scattered at 
the mouth of Sheol " — this plowing and turning up the soil, look- 
ing toward a rich harvest ; corresponding to which, the bones of 
the righteous sown in the earth await a glorious harvest in " the 
resurrection of the just." As plowing and seed-sowing are done 
in quiet hope, so the just lay down their bones in glorious hope. 

There is no Hebrew word in the verse answering to " wood," 

and no verb that demands the sense of splitting wood rather 
than cleaving furrows. The Hebrew is in not upon the earth. 

8. But mine eyes are unto thee, O God the Lord : in 
thee is my trust ; leave not my soul destitute. 

9. Keep me from the snares which they have laid for me, 
and the gins of the workers of iniquity. 

10. Let the wicked fall into their own nets, whilst that 
I withal escape. 



534 



PSALM CXLII. 



V. 8 should begin 11 For," not "But." " For l \ implies a logical 
connection, thus : I fear not to lay my bones with all thy saints 
at the mouth of Sheol; "for mine eyes are unto thee, 0 God the 
Lord." "Yet David realizes the fitness of praying God to spare 

his life. "Leave not my soul destitute," seems to mean — Pour 

not out my soul, i. e., my life or life's blood. Remarkably this 
word is used of the Messiah (Isa. 53: 12): "poured out his 
soul unto death/' See also Gen. 24 : 20, and Isa. 32 : 15. 

PSALM CXLII. 

" Maschil of David" — a Psalm by David for public instruction. 
"A prayer when he was in the cave," places this Psalm by the side 
of Ps. 57 and looks historically either to the cave of Adullam (1 
Sam. 22: 1), or of Engedi (1 Sam.24: 3). Yet perhaps it should 
be said that David may have been in more caves during the period 
of Saul's persecutions than the record 'specially mentions. It suf- 
fices that this Psalm refers to those experiences. 

1. I cried unto the Lord with my voice ; with ray voice 
unto the Lord did I make my supplication. 

2. I poured out my complaint before him ; I showed be- 
fore him my trouble. 

The Hebrew reader would notice that all these verbs are future ; 
" I will cry ; will make supplication," etc. In writing this Psalm 
David throws himself back into those scenes and then says : At 
that moment I said, " I will cry" 'etc. This is his way of living those 
experiences over again in fresh remembrance, for grateful praise. 

3. When my spirit was overwhelmed within me, then 
thou knewest my path. In the way wherein I walked have 
they privily laid a snare for me. 

4. I looked on my right hand, and beheld, but there was 
no man that would know me : refuge failed me ; no man 
cared for my soul. 

In v. 4, David wrote, not " I looked," but " look ye " [every 
reader] "on my right hand," where a helper should stand; "see, 
there is not a man there to recognize me ; refuge perished from 
me" — i. e.j no place for flight remained for me, etc. "No man 
cared for my life," i. e., to preserve it; no one thought it worth 
caring for. 

5. I cried unto thee, O Lord: I said, Thou art my re- 
fuge and my portion in the land of the living. 

6. Attend unto my cry; for I am brought very low: 
deliver me from my persecutors"; for they are stronger 
than I. 



PSALM CXLIIL 



535 



7. Bring my soul out of prison, that I may praise thy 
name : the righteous shall compass me about ; for thou shalt 
deal bountifully with me. 

In an emergency so extreme, whither should he fly or could he, 

but to his God only ? " Out of prison," in the metaphorical 

sense — said of himself shut up in the cave, from which for a time 
he dared not come out.— — "The righteous will" [better than 
u shall"] "gather about me, for thou wilt" [I am sure thou wilt] 
" deal bountifully," i. e., in goodness and mercy, " with me." 

PSALM CXLIII. 

This Psalm is closely related to Ps. 142; essentially a continua- 
tion. V. 4 here gives us the same significant words as v. 3 there : 
" My spirit overwhelmed within me." 

1. Hear my prayer, O Lord, give ear to my supplica- 
tions: in thy faithfulness answer me, and in thy righteous- 
ness. 

2. And enter not into judgment with thy servant : for 
in thy sight shall no man living be justified. 

The noticeable point here is that David prays to be answered 
on the basis of God's faithfulness and righteousness, while yet he 
deprecates being judged on the score of strict justice, and even 
says that no living man can abide such an ordeal and come forth 
justified. This moral attitude, this unique position between God's 
covenanted faithfulness and integrity, on the one hand, and his 
simple justice in the eye of law on the other, is by no means, 
unknown to Christian experience. It is the case of one conscious 
of imperfections, deeply sensible of being all unable to stand before 
God blameless in law; yet encouraged to take hold of divine 
promise because it is promise — of God's mercy because it is simple 
mercy — favor shown to those who have sinned and who are still 
conscious of moral weakness and short-comings. 

3. For the enemy hath persecuted my soul; he hath 
smitten my life down to the ground ; he hath made me to 
dwell in darkness, as those that have been long dead. 

4. Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me ; my 
heart within me is desolate. 

"For" introduces one ground of his plea — his extreme want; 
his utter helplessness before his enemies. 

5. I remember the days of old ; I meditate on all thy 
works ; I muse on the work of thy hands. 



536 



PSALM CXLIII. 



6. I stretch forth my hands unto thee : my soul thirsteth 
after thee, as a thirsty land. Selah. 

"I remember the days of old," my case then being far better 
than now. Canst not Thou, O my God, restore again to me such days 

of quiet and peace? "I will muse" (future tens*) "on the 

work of thy hands " — to find relief in the thought of what thou 

canst do for my help. In the last clause of v. 6, we should read, 

" My soul is toward thee as a thirsty land," i. e., bears the same 
relation to thee as the thirsty land does to the rain for which it 
pants, withering for the want thereof. 

7. Hear me speedily, O Lord ; my spirit faileth : hide 
not thy face from me, lest I be like unto them that go down 
into the pit. 

8. Cause me to hear thy loving-kindness in the morning ; 
for in thee, do I trust : cause me to know the way wherein 
I should w r alk ; for I lift up my soul unto thee. 

9. Deliver me, O Lord, from mine enemies : I flee unto 
thee to hide me. 

In v. 7 are two distinct prayers, each followed by its own rea- 
son or ground. "Hear me, for my spirit faileth; hide not thy face 
from me, for I have already become like those that go down to 
the pit" — this last verb being in the past time. The English 

margin translates the Hebrew correctly. "In the morning" — 

soon; close after this fearful night of darkness. The last clause 

of v. 9 is a Hebrew idiom like this : Unto thee I cover myself, 
i. e , flying unto thee, I have [in thought] covered myself— in 
safety. 

10. Teach me to do thy will ; for thou art my God : thy 
Spirit is good ; lead me into the land of uprightness. 

11. Quicken me, O Lord, for thy name's sake : for thy 
righteousness' sake bring my soul out of trouble. 

12. And of thy mercy cut off mine enemies, and destroy 
all them that afflict my soul : for I am thy servant. 

Most pertinently and beautifully [in the moral sense] David rec- 
ognizes the truth that he can in nowise expect God's interposi- 
tion to save his life and lead him to the throne of Israel save as 
his heart is upright — save as he is taught of God and lives under 

the guidance of his good Spirit. Hence this prayer. "For I 

am thy servant " (v. 12) signifies, I am called of thee into this 
service to be the future leader of the people of Israel. All these 
life-perils from the jealousy of King Saul are occasioned by that 
very call which thou didst send me through thy prophet Samuel. 
Now, Lord, since thou hast called me into these perils and laid 
on me these responsibilities, wilt thou not bear me safely through 
them ? May I not trust in thy faithfulness and love, and in thy 



PSALM CXLIV. 



537 



power to save ? Purely, if thou dost but remember that I am thy 
servant, thou wilt not leave me to perish ! 

PSALM CXLIV. 

The former part of this Psalm is almost a reproduction of Ps. 
18, so many of its expressions are here and so much of its spirit. 
As that Psalm was composed after the Lord had delivered David 
from all his enemies and especially from Saul, so this seems to have 
the same occasion and purpose. Closely following a series (140- 
143) in which David and Saul are the prominent characters, and 
the experiences of the former under the persecutions of the latter 
are the great themes, this breaks forth in thanksgiving for gracious 
and complete deliverance wrought for him by his Almighty Re- 
deemer. This deliverance having been wrought and David secure- 
ly seated on the throne of Israel, it was appropriate for a great 
king over an agricultural people to think of sons growing up with 
stalwart strength ; daughters polished in the graces and utilities 
befitting their sex ; garners full ; sheep in countless numbers ; 
oxen strong for burdens; quietness and order combining to en- 
hance the happiness of a people whose God is the faithful Jeho- 
vah of Israel. 

1. Blessed be the Lord my strength, which teacheth my 
hands to war, and my fingers to fight : 

2. My goodness, and my fortress ; my high tower, and my 
deliverer; my shield, and he in whom I trust; who sub- 
dueth my people under me. 

Comparing these verses with Ps. 18 : 34, 2, the additional word 
here is " my goodness," literally, my mercy in the sense — the Giver 
of my mercies ; the Source of my undeserved blessings. 

3. Lord, what is man, that thou takest knowledge of 
him ! or the son of man, that thou makest account of him ! 

4. Man is like to vanity : his days are as a shadow that 
passeth away. 

Closely translated, we must read, "Lord, what is man — and [or 
yet] thou hast known him? the son of man — and [or yet] thou 
hast thought carefully of him?" These words appear for sub- 
stance in Ps. 8 ; yet have a pertinent connection of thought here. 
How wonderful that God should think so kindly of man ; should 
give him so much of his thought, his care, and his power to save, 
as this review of his mercies to me exhibits in my case ! For man 
is only a breath, a shadow that soon passeth away. 

5. Bow thy heavens, O Lord, and come down : touch the 
mountains, and they shall smoke. 



538 



PSALM 'CXLIV. 



6. Cast forth lightning, and scatter them: shoot out 
thine arrows, and destroy them. 

7. Send thine hand from above; rid me, and deliver 
me out of great waters, from the hand of strange chil- 
dren. 

8. Whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand 
is a right hand of falsehood. 

Thus David had prayed under the fearful strain of his perils. 
The prayer is reproduced here (as in Ps. 18: 3, 6) to present in 
stronger light the wonders of God's redeeming mercy in answer. 

"From the hand of strange children" (here as in Ps. 18: 

44, 45) refers to aliens, perhaps of the class of Doeg the Edomite. 
It would seem that Saul found the most manageable instruments 
for his malign purposes among men of foreign birth and of spirit 
alien from Hebrew sympathies. They were equal to any demand 
for falsehood or violence. 

9. I will sing a new song unto thee, O God : upon a 
psaltery and an instrument of ten strings will I sing praises 
unto thee. 

10. It is he that giveth salvation unto kings : who deliv- 
ereth David his servant from the hurtful sword. 

A new song will celebrate these new mercies. "A psaltery 

of ten strings " — one instrument is all that the Hebrew words call 
for here. "The hurtful sword" — in the strong sense of death- 
bearing — the sword aimed at my life*. 

11. Rid me, and deliver me from the hand of strange 
children, whose mouth speaketh vanity, and their right hand 
is a right hand of falsehood : 

12. That our sons may be as plants grown up in their 
youth ; that our daughters may be as corner-stones, polished 
after the similitude of a palace : 

" That our sons may be as grown-up plants even in their 
youth," t. e., early reaching their maturity, and that, one of comely 

proportions and stalwart vigor. " Our daughters as polished 

corner-stones for the building of the temple" — with reference to 
highly ornamented stones which appeared in the foundation of 
the model temple. Elegance and utility, the latter of most sub- 
stantial sort, are admirably combined in this expressive compari- 
son. We must admire David s profoundly just views of woman's 
sphere in society. 

13. That our garners may be full, affording all manner 
of store ; that our sheep may bring forth thousands and ten 
thousands in our streets : 

14. That our oxen may be strong to labor ; that there be 



PSALM CXLV. 



539 



no breaking hi, or going out : that there be no complaining 
in our streets. 

15. Happy is that people, that is in such a case: yea, 
happy is that people, whose God is the Lord. 

"Garners full, producing from sort to sort" — every variety of 
useful grain in abundance. "Oxen strong to bear" — this animal 
being in those days used for burden as well as for draft. " No 
breach and no going forth " — all safely kept and none escaping. 
" No outcry of distress " (perhaps not even of rudeness) " in our 
streets" or public squares. O how blessed the people who live so ; 
how blessed the people whose God is Jehovah ! 

PSALM CXLV. 

Very appropriately this is called David's " Praise-Psalm." The 
last from his pen in the Psalter, it groups together in lofty strains, 
from a full heart, the noblest utterances of praise ; the richest testi- 
monies to the universal benevolence of the Great Father. The 

greater part of the terms and phrases of this Psalm have appeared 
in other Psalms, and need no additional comment here. 

1. I will extol thee, my God, O King; and I will bless 
thy name forever and ever. 

2. Every day will I bless thee ; and I will praise thy 
name forever and ever. 

3. Great is the Lord, and greatly to be praised ; and his 
greatness is unsearchable. 

4. One generation shall praise thy works to another, and 
shall declare thy mighty acts. 

"One generation shall laud thy works to another" — fathers to 
their sons ; the aged and those of mature years to the young, bear- 
ing their testimony to the great deeds of Jehovah so that this 
knowledge of what God has done, may pass down traditionally 
through all human generations. This is fully in harmony with 
the divine order — with the duties enjoined upon parents in the 
Mosaic law, and with the spirit of their commemorative institu- 
tions. See Deut. 4: 9, 10, and 6: 6, 7, and 11: 19, and Ps. 78: 
3-7. 

5. I will speak of the glorious honor of thy majesty, and 
of thy wondrous works. 

6. And men shall speak of the might of thy terrible acts : 
and I will declare thy greatness. 

7. They shall abundantly utter the memory of thy great 
goodness, and shall sing of thy righteousness. 



540 



PSALM CXLV. 



In v. 5, I will muse is better than " speak" as being the primary 
and more usual sense of the Hebrew word. It suggests that these 
glorious qualities of God's character and deeds should be not 
merely talked about and extolled in song, but be deeply pondered, 
laid close upon our very heart, that so their legitimate impression 
may be wrought into our very soul, and may mold our whole spirit 

and character into God's own moral image. "Terrible acts" — 

such as should inspire reverence and fear to sin. " Abundantly 

utter " translates a word which properly means to pour forth as from 
a fountain, it being implied that men have these glorious deeds of 
their God so thoroughly in memory and heart that they need only 
open their lips and the praises of God pour forth. "Righteous- 
ness," as often, not'in the sense of mere justice, but nearly synony- 
mous with goodness. 

8. The Lord is gracious, and full of compassion ; slow to 
anger, and of great mercy. 

9. The Lord is good to all : and his tender mercies are 
over all his works. 

10. All thy works shall praise thee, O Lord ; and thy 
saints shall bless thee. 

"All thy works shall praise thee" is a poetic conception, yet 
exquisitely beautiful and just. All nature, all the beneficent 
arrangements by which God clothes the earth with beauty and 
makes it minister to the sustenance and joy of all sentient beings — 
all have a voice to witness for God and proclaim his praise. How 
much more should thy saints to whom thou hast given intelligence 
to see and appreciate thy love pour forth their praises in honor of 
thy name ! 

11. They shall speak of the glory of thy kingdom, and 
talk of thy power ; 

12. To make known to the sons of men his mighty acts, 
and the glorious majesty of his kiDgdom. 

13. Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and thy 
dominion endureth throughout all generations. 

Under the general head of God's " kingdom" are grouped what- 
ever pertains to his moral reign — his rule over intelligent beings by 
means of his law and the course of his providence. In this, God 
reveals his higher glories — the purest love of his nature, supreme 
wisdom, a most beneficent care of his dutiful children; justice also 
in defense of the oppressed and in retribution upon oppressors. 
This kingdom will long outlast this material world and its lower 
orders of sentient being. All along the lapse of its eternal ages, 
it will shine on with growing splendor and a purer glory. 

14. The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth up all 
those that be bowed down. 



PSALM CXLVI. 



541 



15. The eyes of all wait upon thee ; and thou givest them 
their meat in due seasou. 

16. Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of 
every liviug thiug. 

" Upholdeth all that fall," who yet are supposed to be his people, 

trustful and obedient. "The eyes of all wait upon thee" — in 

hopeful expectation. The unintelligent animals are guided by 
what we call instinct — God's gift to them adapted to their consti- 
tution, under which they know where to look for their daily food. 
God does not deceive their expectations ; is never reckless of their 
wants. 

17. The Lord is righteous in all his ways, and holy in 
all his works. 

18. The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon him, 
to all that call upon him in truth. 

19. He will fulfill the desire of them that fear him : he 
also will hear their cry, and will save them. 

20. The Lord preserveth all them that love him : but all 
the wicked will he destroy. 

21. My mouth shall speak the praise of the Lord : and 
let all flesh bless his holy name forever and ever. 

"Holy in all his works" — but in this case the word for "holy" 
looks not so much to the moral purity of his character or to his 

abhorrence of sin, as to his merciful kindness, his compassion. 

"Nigh to those who call upon him in truth," makes "in truth" 
emphatic and suggests that sometimes men nominally, apparently, 
call upon God with no real sincerity, no sense of dependence, no 
feeling of want, no humble uplifting of the heart for his gracious 
help. To such callers, God is by no means nigh. The real call 
that rises from a full and earnest soul, a broken and humble spirit, 
he can never despise. The Psalmist defines their character as those 

that "fear him" and "love him." Sublimely David closes with 

declaring his own personal purpose : " My mouth shall speak the 
praise of Jehovah" — now and evermore, with this mortal tongue 
and this human pen, now ; and with my immortal song through the 
ages of the eternal future. And " let all flesh— all of human kind, 
men of every nation — bless his holy name forever — all along down 
the lapse of years till time shall be no more ; and then begin their 
truly everlasting song ! 

PSALM CXLVI. 

The remaining are all Praise-songs, each commencing with " Hal- 
lelujah" — i. e., a call to all the people to praise the Lord. Notice- 
ably this word belongs to the later Hebrew, not being found in 



542 



PSALM CXLVI. 



any Psalm ascribed to David, nor indeed in any of the Psalms of 
the first three books. In the Psalms of the age of the restoration, 

it occurs very frequently. These five closing Psalms obviously 

belong to the age of the restoration. The Septuagint places at the 
head of the first four the words : Psalms " of Haggai and Zecha- 

riah." They take up the strain of David's Psalm of praise (145) ; 

dwell largely on the same special points, yet add some new points 
growing out of their peculiar circumstances. 

1. Praise ye the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. 

2. While I live will I praise the Lord : I will sing 
praises unto my God while I have any being. 

The writer avows his own purpose to praise God, and gives words 
in the use of which every worshiper should feel himself specially 
invited to the same reasonable and glorious service. 

3. Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, 
in whom there is no help. 

4. His breath goeth forth, he returneth to his earth; in 
that very day his thoughts perish. 

Though princes, Cyrus especially and Darius also, have done us 
worthy service, yet many others have proved false, and none have 
served our Zion to any purpose save as " the Lord has stirred up 
their spirit" to it (Ezra. 1:1). Therefore put not your trust in 
princes for help. At best their breath is soon gone, and they 
return to their mother earth as was said to our first father — Unto 

dust thou shalt return " (Gen. 3 : 19). In that day his thoughts, 

in the sense of plans or promises of help, must perish. The pas- 
sage does not say that this man, dead, will think no more in the 
future toorld, but only that his thoughts as of one to be trusted for 
earthly help, will perish. 

5. Happy is he that hath the God of Jacob for his help, 
whose hope is in the Lord his God : 

6. Which made heaven, and earth, the sea, and all that 
therein is : which keepeth truth forever : 

7. Which executeth judgment for the Oppressed : which 
giveth food to the hungry. The Lord looseth the prison- 
ers : 

8. The Lord openeth the eyes of the blind : the Lord 
raiseth them that are bowed down: the Lord loveth the 
righteous : 

9. The Lord preserveth the strangers ; he relieveth the 
fatherless and the widow : but the way of the wicked he 
turneth upside down. 

The God of Jacob has all the qualities requisite for a perfect 
Helper. The Maker of heaven and earth — how can he lack power 



PSALM CLXVII. 



543 



to help? Keeping truth forever and therefore faithful to every 
promise; " executing judgment for the oppressed," and therefore 
sure to help all who really need his helping hand ; entering into 
every sort of real suffering with prompt and perfect sympathy — 
for the hungry, for the prisoner (like ourselves in Babylon) ; for 
the blind, the bowed down, the stranger, the fatherless, the widow — 
ah, indeed, where are the suffering sons of want for whom he has 
not a heart full of love and a hand laden with the very help they 
need ? 

10. The Lord shall reign forever, even thy God, O Zion, 
unto all generations. Praise ye the Lord. 

And the beauty and glory of the case is that this precious, mu- 
nificent and righteous reign shall endure forever ! The very God 
of Zion is to sit on the throne of the heavens and the earth through 
all generations. 0 give his name all praise ! 

PSALM CXLVII. 

The four remaining Psalms have many points in common, and 
are obviously a series having the same general purpose. They 
are all admirably adapted to be sung upon the completion of the 
city walls, effected under the supervision of Nehemiah. They 

contain various expressions which indicate that joyous event. 

It was eminently fit that a series of such Psalms as these should 
close the entire collection. It need not be assumed that they were 
written for the purpose of rounding out the Psalter with super- 
lative songs of praise. Rather, this is probable, viz., that having 
been prepared for the joyous celebration of completing the city 
walls, they were found eminently suitable for this place in the 
entire collection. 

1. Praise ye the Lord : for it is good to sing praises 
unto our God ; for it is pleasant ; and praise is comely. 

2. The Lord doth build up Jerusalem : he gathereth 
together the outcasts of Israel. 

3. He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their 
wounds. 

In verse 2 we might read, "Jehovah is the builder of Jerusalem ;" 
this rebuilding, then fresh in their eyes, is the work of his hands. 
"He will gather the outcasts of Israel together ;" his scattered 
captives he will restore to their native land and raise them again 
to a place of honor among the nations. The captives who sat by 
the rivers of Babylon and wept as they remembered Zion, the Lord 
has met in mercy, wiped their tears away, and bound up their 
heart-wounds. 



514 



PSALM CXLVII. 



4. He telleth the number of the stars; he calleth them 
all by their names. 

5. Great is our Lord, and of great power : his under- 
standing is infinite. 

6. The Lobd lifteth up the meek : he casteth the wicked 
down to the ground. 

It is in place to celebrate the greatness and majesty of our De- 
liverer. The Great God of nature — he knows the stars by name ; 
has boundless power and infinite wisdom, and withal he executes 
judgment in lifting up the humble and hurling down the proud. 

7. Sing unto the Lord with thanksgiving; sing praise 
upon the harp unto our God : 

8. Who covereth the heavens with clouds, who prepareth 
rain for the earth, who maketh grass to grow upon the 
mountains. 

9. He giveth to the beast his food, and to the young 
ravens which cry. 

One of the most prominent and striking features of this series 
of Psalms is the continual blending of God's agencies in nature 
with his works in his providential government. In the former he 
gives the rain of heaven and the grass on the mountains ; in the latter, 
he builds Jerusalem, restores the exiles, visits retribution of good 
or evil upon saints and sinners as they deserve. It seems to be a 
special aim with the writer [and with the inditing Spirit] to im- 
press the great truth that the same God doeth all these things. 

10. He delighteth not in the strength of the horse : he 
taketh not pleasure in the legs of a man. 

11. The Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him, 
in those that hope in his mercy. 

This antithesis is striking. In the mind of God the things of 
interest are not the power of the war-horse or of the war-man; 
but rather, the reverent fear and the humble faith of his people. 
All unlike the estimate which men of the world form, these moral 
qualities are his admiration. 

12. Praise the Lord, O Jerusalem; praise thy God, O 
Zion. 

13. For he hath strengthened the bars of thy gates ; he 
hath blessed thy children within thee. 

14. He maketh peace in thy borders, and filleth thee 
with the finest of the wheat. 

These verses refer pointedly to the times of Nehemiah when, after 
scenes of no small peril and of immense labor, the walls were fin- 
ished, the gates made strong, and the joyous people celebrated 



PSALM CXLVIII. 



545 



their rebuilt city with grateful songs. Plentiful harvests were 
another occasion for thanksgiving. 

15. He sendeth forth his commandment upon earth : his 
word runneth very swiftly. 

16. He giveth snow like wool : he scattereth the hoar 
frost like ashes. 

17. He casteth forth his ice like morsels : who can stand 
before his cold? 

18. He sendeth out his word, and melteth them : he 
causeth his wind to blow, and the Avaters flow. 

" Sending forth his commandment" " his word running very 
swiftly" — harmonize in conception and phrase with what is said 
of God's creative power : " He spake and it was done ; he com- 
manded, and it stood fast." God's agencies in nature are supposed 
to be sent forth in and by his word. He commands, and the rains 
come; he sends forth his word, and genial suns send down their 
heat. He speaks, and snow, ice, hail, and fearful cold are abroad 
on the face of the earth. Again, he sendeth forth his word and 

melteth them. There may be a tacit allusion to the winter of their 

bondage in Babylon — now at length followed by the warm breath 
of spring, melting the frost-bands and opening the warm bosom 
of their home-land to welcome their return. 

19. He showeth his word unto Jacob, his statutes and 
his judgments unto Israel. 

20. He hath not dealt so with any nation : and as for his 
judgments, they have not known them. Praise ye the 
Lord. 

The other and more usual sense of "word" appears here. The 
Psalmist sets forth the peculiar favor shown to Israel in the gift 
from the Lord of his statutes and judgments, i. e., laws, moral, 
civil, and religious, including institutions and ordinances for the 
moral culture of the people. No other nation had ever been so 
favored. 

oo^OO 

PSALM CXLVIII. 

The great Hallelujah chorus rises in this Psalm to a loftier 
strain, calling upon all that is in the heavens (other than God) 
and all that is upon the earth to unite in extolling the Great God 
with highest praises. With noticeable method and order vs. 1-6 
group together the details of the upper, heavenly world; while vs. 
7-14, in like manner, seize upon the salient points of this earthly 
sphere — first, the inanimate and the unintelligent orders ; and 
lastly, the intelligent. 



546 



PSALM CXLVIII. 



1. Praise ye the Lord. Praise ye the Lord from the 
heavens : praise him in the heights. 

2. Praise ye him, all his angels : praise ye him all his 
hosts. 

3. Praise ye him, sun and moon : praise him, all ye stars 
of light. ^ 

4. Praise him, ye heavens of heavens, and ye waters that 
be above the heavens. 

5. Let them praise the name of the Lord : for he com- 
manded and they were created. 

6. He hath also established them forever and ever : he 
hath made a decree which shall not pass. 

In v. 2, "hosts" is ambiguous, being applied either to the in- 
telligent creatures or to the non-intelligent objects of the upper 
world. The Psalmist's general purpose did not require a nice dis- 
crimination on this point. He calls on both classes for praise — 
seraphs, principalities, and powers in the heavenly places; and 
also, stars, suns, every object known to man or unknown, in the 
worlds above. "Ye waters that be above the heavens" con- 
forms to the current views of the ancients, which appear Gen. 1 : 
6, 7, and more than once in the Psalms. Let all these heavenly 
bodies praise the name of Jehovah for by his word they came into 
being, and under his changeless laws they hold their place and 
fulfill their mission. 

7. Praise the Lord from the earth, ye dragons, and all 
deeps : 

8. Fire, and hail ; snow, and vapor ; stormy wind fulfilling 
his word : 

9. Mountains, and all hills; fruitful trees, and all cedars : 

10. Beasts, and all cattle; creeping things, and flying 
fowl : 

In v. 8 the clause, "fulfilling his word," may legitimately apply 
not to "stormy wind" only, but to "fire and hail:" "snow and 
vapor." All alike and all most perfectly obey his high behest 
and know no will but his. Let them all therefore join in his ex- 
alted praises. 

11. Kings of the earth, and all people ; princes, and all 
judges of the earth : 

12. Both young men, and maidens ; old men, and chil- 
dren : 

13. Let them praise the name of the Lord: for his name 
alone is excellent ; his glory is above the earth and heaven. 

In the great human family, the loftiest are by no means to be 
exempted. .Rather let those be named first of all. "Kings of the 



PSALM CXLIX. 



547 



earth;" "princes and all judges ; " let them remember Him who is 
infinitely above them ; to whom they are supremely amenable ; 
from whose creative hand they have their very existence and whose 
providence has raised them to a little brief authority over their 

fellows. Let all these classes of intelligent beings of the human 

race combine to praise the name of the Lord, for his name only is 
excellent— the word " name " indicating his nature, the qualities or 
attributes of his character. His excellence towers high above both 
earth and heaven. Compared with his infinite being, the universe 
of his works is only a very little thing ! 

14. He also exalteth the horn of his people, the praise of 
all his saints ; even of the children of Israel, a people near 
unto him. Praise ye the Lord. 

"The horn of his people," here as usual, the emblem of 
strength — the sense being that in restoring his people to their 
father-land, and now in prospering them to complete the rebuilding 
of their city walls, he had once more lifted them to power — above 
contempt, and even to respectability before the nations of the 

earth. The clause, " The praise of all his saints," must depend 

grammatically on the first verb, "exalteth," with this sense: He 
hath lifted on high the praises of his people—giving them occasion 
by his manifold and especially his then recent mercies to praise 
his name in loftiest strains. Therefore let them unite in this grand 
and most sublime Hallelujah I 

PSALM CXLIX. 

This part of the great Hallelujah chorus applies specially to 
God's people, continuing and expanding the theme which was 
reached in the closing verses of Ps. 148. The relation of God's 
people to himself is the main subject. 

1. Praise ye the Lord. Sing unto the Lord a new song, 
and his praise in the congregation of saints. 

2. Let Israel rejoice in him that made him : let the chil- 
dren of Zion be joyful in their King. 

3. Let them praise his name in the dance : let them sing 
praises unto him with the timbrel and harp. 

A "new song" celebrates new mercies — in the present case, the 
mercies of God to his recently restored people, consummated in the 
rebuilding of their city walls. That this was regarded at the time 
as furnishing rich occasion for praise may be seen in the history 
(Neh. 12: 27-43): "At the dedication of the walls of Jerusalem, 
they sought the Levites out of all their places, to bring them to 
Jerusalem to keep the dedication with gladness, both with thanks- 



548 



PSALM CXLIX. 



giving and with singing, with cymbals, psalteries, and with harps," 

etc. " Let them praise his name in the dance " — or with the 

dance, this being then a recognized mode of expressing their joy 
in God. The reader will recall the scenes when David brought 
up the ark to Mt. Zion (2 Sam. 6: 14-16). See also Ps. 30: 11. 

4. For the Lord taketh pleasure in his people : he will 
beautify the meek with salvation. 

5. Let the saints be joyful in glory : let them sing aloud 
upon their beds. 

" The Lord is pleased to accept his people " [Hebrew] — the verb 
being in common use for the Lord's acceptance of sacrifices offered 
in sincerity, and therefore would suggest to any Hebrew mind the 
ground of this acceptance or . " pleasure " — not their worthiness 

alone but in connection with forgiveness bought with blood. 

"Let the saints be joyful in glory," i. e., in the honor now con- 
ferred upon them and upon Zion. " Let them sing aloud upon 
their beds," i. e., at their homes, in their retired hours as well as 
in public : with perhaps a tacit allusion to their previous trials in 
which many a pillow had been wet with tears. 

6. Let the high praises of God be in their mouth, and a 
two-edged sword in their hand ; 

7. To execute vengeance upon the heathen, and punish- 
ments upon the people ; 

8. To bind their kings with chains, and their nobles with 
fetters of iron ; 

9. To execute upon them the judgment written : this 
honor have all his saints. Praise ye the Lord. 

" God's praises in their mouths and a two-edged sword in their 
hand " — for they were fresh from the wall-building of the city in 
which " they who builded on the wall and they that bare burdens, 
with one of his hands wrought in the work, and with the other 
hand held a weapon" (Neh. 4: 17). The whole passage looks 
back probably to the commission which God gave Israel to drive 
out the idolatrous Canaanites. So far as the letter of it is con- 
cerned, its form comes from the past, though in the spirit thereof 
its outlook may be into the future — the bloodless victories of truth 
over the hearts of the King's enemies. In the interpretation of 
this passage it would be quite unauthorized to ignore the great 
facts of the early history of Israel on the one hand, and not less 
so on the other hand to ignore the great facts of the future age, 
set forth even then in prophecy and fulfilled in the Gospel era 
under the Prince of Peace who gives his people only " the sword 
of the Spirit which is the word of God." The letter of our passage 
comes from the former; the spirit and the present meaning are 
amply revealed in the latter. 



PSALM CL. 



540 



PSALM CL. 

The scope of this short, closing Psalm is a model of simplicity, 
beauty and power. Praise the Lord — where? (v. 1); for what? 
(v. 2); with what? (vs. 3-5); and finally, upon whom is the call 
made ? (v. 6). 

1. Praise ye the Lord. Praise God in his sanctuary; 
praise him in the firmament of his power. 

2. Praise him for his mighty acts : praise him according 
to his excellent greatness. 

3. Praise him with the sound of the trumpet : praise him 
with the psaltery and harp. 

4. Praise him with the timbrel and dance : praise him 
with stringed instruments and organs. 

5. Praise him upon the loud cymbals : praise him upon 
the high sounding cymbals. 

6. Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord. 
Praise ye the Lord. 

Praise him in his sanctuary below; in his glorious firmament 
above — comprehensively put for his entire universe. Praise him 
for the great things he has done and for the very greatness itself 

which belongs to him as God over all Then bring together all 

the instruments of music known to human art. All are too mean 
to speak his praises as they deserve. — — And finally, let the whole 
animate creation : all the living ; let everything that hath breath 
praise the Lord. Poetically considered, it is charming to call upon 
the silent spheres above ; and below, upon mountains, and all hills, 
fire and hail, snow and vapor, the windy storm and the loud-voiced 
thunder, to join the grand chorus of universal praise; yet in plain 
speech and to sober thought, we reach the height of duty and the 
perfect statement of it when we say : Let everything that hath 
breath and the voluntary power to use it, pour forth that breath in 
grateful songs of praise to Jehovah, Father, Maker, Lord of all! 



24- 



550 



APPENDIX. 



BRIEF SUMMARY OF 

The Historical Points of the Several Psalms, 
viz., their Author, date and occasion. 



The first Book of the Psalter comprises Psalms 1-41. All these 
Psalms are, on good authority, ascribed to David as their author. 

Ps. I. Perhaps prepared as an introduction to Book I. 

Ps. II. Probably written after the prophetic announcement by 
Nathan (2 Sam. 7). 

Ps. Ill — VII. Probably all refer to the times of Absalom's con- 
spiracy. 

Ps. VIII. Date unknown. Probably subsequent to the prophecy 
of 2 Sam. 7. 

Ps. IX. During his national wars; after some victories, and while 

other conflicts were pending. 
Ps. X. Same date as Ps. IX. 

Ps. XI. May refer either to the times of Saul or the times of 
Absalom. 

Ps. XII. No certain date indicated. 

Ps. XIII. Makes no allusions to historic circumstances, but gives 

experiences under severe trials. 
Ps. XIV. Perhaps suggested by the case of Nabal of Mt. Carmel 

(1 Sam. 25). 

Ps. XV. Same date with Ps. 24 : on occasion of bringing up the 
ark to Mt. Zion (2 Sam. 6: and 1 Chron. 13). 

Ps. XVI. Probably dates after the revelations made to David ; as 
in 2 Sam. 7. 

Ps. XVII. Apparently looks to his sufferings from Saul. 
Ps. XVIII. After his deliverance from all his enemies and from 
Saul. 

Ps. XIX. No historic occasion. 

Ps. XX. Upon going out to war against Ammon and Syria com- 
bined (2 Sam. 10: 6-19, and 1 Chron. 19: 6-19). 

Ps. XXI. Shortly after Ps. 20: on occasion of victories in answer 
to those prayers. 

Ps. XXII. Of a class with Ps. 16 : having no special reference 

to historic events. 
Ps. XXIII. After his persecutions from Saul, and while yet he 

needed the care of the Good Shepherd. 



APPENDIX. 551 

Ps. XXIV. Upon the location of the ark on Mt. Zion; as in 2 
Sam. 6 : 

Ps. XXV. — XXIX. Prepared soon after the location of the ark 
on Mt. Zion and the more ample use of song in the sanc- 
tuary service. 

Ps. XXX. The occasion appears in 2 Sam. 24, and 1 Chron. 21 : 
the location of the great temple after the staying of the 
plague. 

Ps. XXXI. Perhaps alludes the scenes of 1 Sam. 23 — David's 

signal escape from Saul. 
Ps. XXXII. David, after his great sin in the matter of Uriah and 

Bathsheba — at a stage somewhat earlier than Ps. 51. 
Ps. XXXIII. Shortly subsequent to Ps. 32 — celebrating the joys 

and expressing the gratitude and praise of the true penitent. 
Ps. XXXIV. David before Achish of Gath ; as in 1 Sam. 21 : 

10-15. 

Ps. XXXV. Closely related to Ps. 34, and to 1 Sam. 24— when 
David spared the life of Saul. 

Ps. XXXVI. Its occasion may have been some striking manifes- 
tation of depravity. 

Ps. XXXVII. Its views of men are not special but general. 

Ps. XXXVIII. — XLI. The conspiracy of Adonijah— in David's 
extreme old age (1 Kings 1:) 

BOOK II. 

[Viz., Ps. 42-72.] 

Of these thirty-one Psalms, eight may be assigned to the sons 
of Korah — (42-49) ; one (Ps. 50) to Asaph ; nineteen to David ; 
viz., Ps. 51-65, and Ps. 68-71 ; two are anonymous, viz., Ps. 66 
and 67, and one (Ps. 72) is by Solomon. 

Ps. XLII. — XLIII. A pair; with little if any doubt, the experi- 
ences of David driven from home and throne by Absalom. 

Ps. XLIV. Date and occasion uncertain ; possibly the same as 
Ps. 60; probably during the reign of the later kings of 
Judah. 

Ps. XLV. Date, during the reign of Solomon; later than the 

" Song of Solomon." 
Ps. XLVL With great probability, in the times of Hezekiah and 

Sennacherib. 

Ps. XLVII. The reign of Jehoshaphat; his kingdom invaded by 

Moab, Ammon and Edom (2 Chron. 20). 
Ps. XL VIII. Same date as Ps. 47 : one sung on the field of battle 

(2 Chron. 20: 26); the other after their return, victorious., 

to Jerusalem (vs. 27, 28). 
Ps. XLIX. No special allusion to history ; but a generalization 

from a mass of observed facts. 
Ps. L. An ideal judgment scene, illustrating God's retribution on 

the wicked. 



552 



APPENDIX. 



Ps. LI. David's conviction and penitence for his sin in the case 

of Uriah and Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11 and 12). 
Ps. LII. David and Doeg (1 Sam. 21 and 22). 
Ps. LIII. Repeats Ps. 14 with slight variations. 
Ps. LIY. David and the Ziphites; (1 Sam. 23: 19 and 26: 1). 
Ps. LV. Probably of the times of Saul, it being located among 

Psalms of that sort. 
Ps. LVI. David and the Philistines of Gath (1 Sam. 21 : 10-12). 
Ps. LVII. David fleeing before Saul secretes himself in caves: 

(1 Sam. 22: 1, and 24: 1). 
Ps. LVIII. Probably dating with those that precede and the next 

that follows — in the reign of Saul. 
Ps. LIX. Sauline; (1 Sam. 19: 11-17). 

Ps. LX. The great war against Syria and Edom (2 Sam. S, and 

1 Chron. 18). 
Ps. LXI. Probably the times of Absalom. 

Ps. LXII. Probably of the times of Saul ; though possibly, of 
Absalom. 

Ps. LXIII. With great probability, the times of Absalom. 

Ps. LX1V. The times of Absalom and Ahithophel. 

Ps. LXV. Thanksgiving for victory over the revolt of Absalom 

and for fruitful seasons. 
Ps. LXVI. Probably the same as Ps. 65. 

Ps. LXVII. Thanksgiving for bountiful harvests; occasion not 

otherwise suggested. 
Ps. LXVIII. Probably celebrates the great victory over Rabbah 

and the Ammonites. (2 Sam. 12: 26-31). 
Ps. LXIX. Conspiracy of Adonijah ; David's old age and debility 

(1 Kings 1). 

Ps. LXX. Identical with the last paragraph of Ps. 40 : times of 
Adonijah. 

Ps. LXXI. A continuation of Ps. 70; for the times of Adonijah. 
Ps. LXXII. By Solomon; probably early in his life 

BOOK III. 

Seventeen Psalms, viz., Ps. 73-89. Of these, eleven (Ps. 73-83) 
are assigned to Asaph ; four (Ps. 84, 85, 87, 88) io the sons of 
Korah; one (Ps. 86) to David; and one (Ps. 89) to Ethan. 

Ps. LXXIII. Drawn from general history rather than special; 
of course, having no historic reference for its date or oc- 
casion. 

Ps. LXXIV. Destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldeans. 

Ps. LXXV. Times of Hezekiah and Sennacherib (2 Kings 19, 

and Isa. 37). 
Ps. LXXVI. Same as Ps. 75. 

Ps. LXXVII. At some point between the revolt and the captiv- 
ity, not definitely indicated, but a time of sore trial. 
Ps. LXXVI1I. Either the time of David's reign over Judah only 



APPENDIX. 



553 



(2 Sain. 2-5) or the war between Abijah and Jeroboam 
(2 Chron. 13). 

Ps. LXXIX. Same date and occasion with Ps. 74, the fall of the 

city before the Chaldeans. 
Ps. LXXX. Contemplates the calamities brought upon the 

Northern kingdom, first by the Syrians ; last by Shalmane- 

ser of Assyria. 

Ps. LXXXI. Nearly the same date as Ps. 80 ; a solemn appeal 
to the people of the ten tribes to return to their God. 

Ps. LXXXII. Probably contemplates the perversions of justice 
prevalent in the Northern kingdom shortly before its final 
fall. 

Ps. LXXXIIT. The great combination against Judah in the 

times of Jehoshaphat (2 Chron. 20). 
Ps. LXXXIV. The first year of Hezekiah ; his invitation to the 

people of the ten tribes to keep the feast at Jerusalem. 
Ps. LXXXV. The great revival under Hezekiah. 
Ps. L XXXVI. Ascribed to David ; placed here by the compilers, 

because adapted to the times of Hezekiah. 
Ps. LXXXVII. Upon the destruction of the great Assyrian host 

(2 K. 19, and Isa. 37). 
Ps. LXXXVIII, LXXXIX. Both of the times of Hezekiah. 

BOOK IV. 

Seventeen Psalms, viz., Ps. 90-106. Of these, two (101 and 
103) are ascribed to David; one (99)^ to Moses. The rest are 
anonymous. Perhaps the authors were themselves the com- 
pilers and therefore omitted their names. Many of these Psalms 
belong to the age of Josiah and his great reformation. 

Ps. XC. By Moses ; shortly before his death. 
Ps. XCT. Perhaps by Moses ; doubtless as a counterpart to Ps. 
90. 

Ps. XCII, XCIII. Pertinent to the reformation under Josiah. 
Ps. XCIV. Refers probably to the wicked reigns of the last kings 
of Judah. 

Ps. XCV — C. Both their adaptations and their sentiments assign 

these Psalms to the times of Josiah. 
Ps. CI. Ascribed to David ; but appropriate to the young king 

Josiah and therefore here. See Notes introductory to this 

Psalm. 

Ps. CII. Probably by Jeremiah ; of his times. 
Ps. CI1I. Ascribed to David. 
Ps. CIV, CV. Times of Josiah' s reformation. 
Ps. CVI. Perhaps in view of the first deportation of captives to 
Babylon. 

BOOK V. 

Forty-four Psalms, viz., Ps. 107-150. Of these, fifteen are 
ascribed to David, viz., Ps. 108-110, 122, 124, 131, 133, 138-145; 



554 



APPENDIX. 



one to Solomon (Ps. 127): all the rest arc anonymous, and appear 
to have been written and all compiled in the age of the Restora- 
tion. 

Ps. CVII. After the return of the exiles from Babylon, cele- 
brating the great mercy of God in that restoration. See 
Notes introductory to this Psalm. 

Ps. CVIII. Ascribed to David ; but made up of two selections, 
viz., from Ps. 57 and 60. 

Ps. CIX. Ascribed to David. His personal enemy alluded to 
may have been Saul, or Absalom, or possibly Ahithophel. 

Ps. CX. By David; corresponds with Ps. 2. 

Ps. CXI— CXIII. A triplet of Praise-Psalms of the age of the 
Restoration. 

Ps. CXIV, CXV. Soon after the return of the exiles ; during the 

period of struggle against powerful enemies. 
Ps. CXVT. After the rebuilding of the temple. 
Ps. CXVII. Perhaps a doxology to Ps. 116. 

Ps. CXVIIT. For the dedication of the second temple (Ezra 6 : 
16-20). 

Ps. CXIX. Very probably by Ezra — this conjecture resting upon 
his great familiarity with the Scriptures and love for them ; 
and upon the harmony between his life among slanderous, 
powerful enemies, and the frequent allusions to such 
enemies in this Psalm. 

Ps. CXX — CXXXIV. Fifteen songs of the ascents or up-goings, 
all adapted to be sung by the exiles returning to Jerusa- 
lem, or, more generally, by the people going up to the holy 
city to attend their yearly festivals. 

Ps. CXXXV. Praise-Psalm, to be sung after their arrival in 
Jerusalem. 

Ps. CXXXVI. Very probably composed for the occasion of lay- 
ing the foundations of the temple (Ezra 3: 10, 11). 

Ps. CXXXVII. Soon after the return of the exiles from Baby- 
lon — a reminiscence to awaken gratitude and praise. 

Ps. CXXXVHI— CXLV. Eight Psalms ascribed to David, yet 
with manifest adaptations to the age of the Restoration. 

Ps. CXLVI — CL. All praise songs, hallelujah-Psalms, some, per- 
haps all of them, composed originally to celebrate the com- 
pletion of the city walls (Xeh. 8). 



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Office of the Holy Communion in tlie Boole of 
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Church of St. John the Evangelist. By Edward Meyrick 
Goulburn, D. D. Adapted by the author for the Episcopal Ser- 
vice in the United States. 1 vol., 12mo. Cloth, $1.00. 

Sermons Preached on Various Occasions during 
the Last Twenty Tears. By Edward Meyrick Goul 
burn, D. D. 1 vol., 12mo. Cloth, $1.00. 

The Idle Word : Short, Religious Essays on the Gift of Speech 
and its Employment in Conversation. By Edward Meyrio* 
Goulburn, D. D. 1 vol., 12mo. Cloth, 15 cents. 

An Introduction to the Devotional Study of the 
Holy Scriptures. By Edward Meyrick Goulburn, D. I). 
First American from the Seventh London Edition. 1 vol., 
12mo. Cloth, $1.00. 

Bither of the al>ove seait free by Mail on receipt of the price. 



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